Andre Kertesz was an amazing photographer. This photo is my current desktop background.

Sendgrid's a great way to send email from your app. They provide statistics, reliable delivery, and a fantastic XML/JSON API. If you're using Ruby, I recommend checkout out Sendgrid Toolkit, which I just found out about.

Sendgrid Toolkit is pretty much a thin wrapper using jnunemaker's HTTParty, which I haven't heard about till now. HTTParty's a pretty cool way to painlessly create an interface to a Web API.

Sendgrid Toolkit's use of HTTParty makes adding functionality very easy. I added bounce retrieve and delete functionality by merely adding the small number of lines seen in the code sample.

I'm currently preparing my slides for my presentation about async IO at next week's Los Angeles Hacker News meetup, and in the process stumbled across this interesting thread on kernel  AIO on the libevent mailing list. This segment of a post from William Ahern stood out in particular. To put this in context, the question is whether to use the kernel's own AIO API, or just roll your own with your own threadpool using one blocking call per thread.

There are many ways to do AIO. I know of none that don't use threads, either kernel threads or user process threads. Now, the threads could be "light weight", but there's still a calling context that blocks on an operation. But no implementation is equivalent to, say, how the socket subsystem [state machines] work, where the only state that needs to be maintained is a queue of waiting objects (where object != thread). To put it simply, all the AIO implementations use too much memory and do too much book keeping (like thread scheduling) than strictly necessary, because kernels don't have a way to to "poll" on VM pages (as opposed to polling on disk interrupts, which you can accomplish when do doing direct I/O).

From what I know, Node.js manages its own thread pool, as does Ruby's event machine (using Ruby green threads). If anyone has any more info on this just tweet me, @andrewvc with what you know.

ZeroMQ's got some interesting ideas, but unfortunately hasn't quite gotten the press it deserves. I'm just starting to toy around with it, mostly due to Zed Shaw's use of it in Mongrel2. Regardless of Mongrel 2, ZeroMQ IS fascinating. Why? A few reasons. I'll get to some of them in a bit, but first I'll let this short block of text from the ZMQ::Socket class's Ruby docs explain why:

Generally speaking, conventional sockets present a synchronous interface to either connection-oriented reliable byte streams (SOCK_STREAM), or connection-less unreliable datagrams (SOCK_DGRAM). In comparison, 0MQ sockets present an abstraction of an asynchronous message queue, with the exact queueing semantics depending on the socket type in use. Where conventional sockets transfer streams of bytes or discrete datagrams, 0MQ sockets transfer discrete messages.

0MQ sockets being asynchronous means that the timings of the physical connection setup and teardown, reconnect and effective delivery are transparent to the user and organized by 0MQ itself. Further, messages may be queued in the event that a peer is unavailable to receive them.

Conventional sockets allow only strict one-to-one (two peers), many-to-one (many clients, one server), or in some cases one-to-many (multicast) relationships. With the exception of ZMQ::PAIR, 0MQ sockets may be connected to multiple endpoints using connect(), while simultaneously accepting incoming connections from multiple endpoints bound to the socket using bind(), thus allowing many-to-many relationships.

The full ZeroMQ Ruby docs are a good read, as are the papers on http://www.zeromq.org/.

So, why else go ZMQ? Well, it's got interchangeable transports. ZeroMQ supports ultra-fast inter-thread messaging, inter-process  communication, TCP, and multicast, as supported transports.

These messages can be exchanged between any language that support ZMQ, at the moment, that's all your faves, from C/C++ to Java, to Ruby, to Python, and more.

Another good source for ZMQ info is this excellent post on Nicholas Piel's blog. Resplendent with diagrams and wonderful explanations.

At any rate, I'm just getting started with ZMQ, as my ZMQ exploration continues I'll update this blog.

I've been toying around with Rails3 the past few weeks. My current Gemfile looks like this:

 gem 'rails', '3.0.0.beta4'
 gem 'capybara'
 gem 'database_cleaner'
 gem 'cucumber-rails'
 gem 'cucumber'
 gem 'rspec-rails', '2.0.0.beta.11'
 gem 'rspec', '2.0.0.beta.11'
 gem 'haml'
 gem 'spork'
 gem 'launchy'
 gem 'mongoid', "2.0.0.beta6"
 gem 'bson_ext'
 gem 'ruby-debug'
 gem 'machinist_mongo', :require => 'machinist/mongoid'
 gem 'faker'
 

I've recently finished reading the Project Gutenberg edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Since, I was reading it on my oh so Convenient Kindle, annotation was quite easy. I ended up making a list words and phrases I needed to look up. Some of these words are still in common use in the British Isles, so be forewarned there's an American bias here.

1. Pips - Small, hard seed in a fruit.
2. Vesta - a short match with a shank of wax-coated threads; also : a short wooden match
3. Mousseline de soie - A fine crisp fabric made of silk
4. Gladstone Bag - a small portmanteau suitcase built over a rigid frame which could separate into two equal sections. They are typically made of stiff leather and often belted with lanyards. The bags are named after William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898)
5. Frogged Jacket - Best described in this image
6. Billycock - A felt hat with a low, rounded crown, similar to a derby.
7. Assizes - The Courts of Assize, or Assizes, were periodic criminal  courts held around England and Wales until 1972.
8. Disjecta Membra - Scattered parts or fragments, as of an author's writings ( or in the context of this Holmes story, the remnants of a recently eaten chicken).
9. Carbuncle - An abscess larger than a boil, usually with one or more openings draining pus onto the skin. ( in the context of Holmes story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, the Blue Carbuncle is in fact a Jewel).
10. Gaol - Jail
11. Wilton Carpet - A Wilton  carpet is a woven wool carpet noted for having up to, but never more than, five colors per pattern.
12. Hasp - A clasp secured with a lock
13. Tout - One who solicits customers brazenly or persistently
14. Monomaniac - A type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas.
15. Fuller's Earth - Any non-plastic clay  or claylike earthy material that can be used to decolorize, filter, and purify animal, mineral, and vegetable oils and greases.
16. Jezail - An Afghan matchlock  or flintlock  musket  fired from a forked rest.
17. Epistle - A writing directed or set to a group of people.
18. Tide Waiter - A customs officer who boards incoming ships at a harbor.
19. Caltrops - An antipersonnel weapon  made up of two or more sharp nails or spines arranged in such a manner that one of them always points upward from a stable base
20. Fess - In heraldry, a fess or fesse (from Middle English fesse, from Old French, from Latin fascia, "band")[1]  is a charge on a coat of arms that takes the form of a band running horizontally across the centre of the shield.
21. Sable - In heraldry, sable is the tincture black, and belongs to the class of dark tinctures, called "colours". In engravings  and line drawings, it is sometimes depicted as a region of crossed horizontal and vertical lines or else marked with sa. as an abbreviation.
22. Distaff - As an adjective  the term distaff is used to describe the female side of a family.
23. Danseuse - A woman who is a ballet dancer.
24. London Season - The social season or Season has historically referred to the annual period when it is customary for members of the a social elite of society to hold debutante balls, dinner parties and large charity events. It was also the appropriate time to be resident in the city rather than in the country, in order to attend such events.
25. Vestry - A storage room in or attached to a church or synagogue.
26. Ulster - A long, loose overcoat made of rough material
27. Coronet - A small crown consisting of ornaments fixed on a metal ring. Unlike a crown, a coronet never has arches.
28. Will-o'-the-wisp - A delusive or misleading hope.
29. Dun - Marked by dullness and drabness
30. Compositor - One that sets written material into type; a typesetter.
31. Dog-cart - A dogcart is a light horse-drawn vehicle.
32. Personate - Impersonate
33. Locus Standi - The ability of a party to bring a lawsuit or participate  in a particular  case

The deep merge gem  seems like it could be useful in a good number of situations dealing with MongoDB and nested documents. Currently I'm trying to use as much JSON as possible, serializing forms to it in JS client-side, validating it in Rails, then sending it over to MongoDB. I don't think I'll need it yet, as I'm usually not dealing with fragments of documents, but I can definitely see this coming into play later.

I've been playing around a bit with MongoDB + Rails recently, and have been trying to figure out whether to use Mongo Mapper or Mongoid. I was pretty certain I wanted to use Mongoid last week, due to its excellent docs, but after reading John Nunemaker's post about Mongo Mapper 0.8 goodies I think I may be switching back over to MongoMapper (luckily I haven't done much yet).

I'm currently learning Clojure and ANTLR (separately), that being the case, this Clojure ANTLR grammar's good study material. This grammar comes from the counterclockwise eclipse plugin for Clojure.

I just got the eBook for Language Implementation Patterns, and its been one of the first books I've had a chance to read on my new Kindle. So far, it's a pretty well written book, and the subject matter is fascinating.