It's pretty crazy out here. The snow was up to my knees on my walk home from work. Click on the image below to go to Elly's photoset of blizzard pics:
Thanks to Zeff Morgan for presenting on my ZipCodeSearch Plugin at the Kentucky Ruby User's Group a couple weeks ago!
Zeff and I had been iterating via email in preparation for his talk, and during the course of our conversation, I realized there were a number of improvements I could make to the plugin. I hope to get those out some time this week (maybe in time for my talk at DeRailed this Thursday night).
Lately, I've been doing a lot of work on WalkingBoss--first with adding Smugmug support, and now with Triplets. What is a Triplet, you ask? Well, it's not one of three screaming babies born at the same time. Not in this case. A Triplet in WalkingBoss lingo is a mini-trip that you can embed in your own blog to share with your friends however you see fit. Allow me to demonstrate with this Triplet from our Christmas tree adventure today...
I got a good laugh out of this wannabe Santa. It sounds like it could have been a lot worse, since he was 12 feet down the chimney before he got stuck!
Dave, I salute your hot-dog-suit-wearing bravery:
This is why I dare not enter the foosball room at Collective Intellect.
I've been playing with porting the GPX library to a faster XML parser. It currently uses REXML, which I've been pretty happy with, except for the speed issues with large files. (I think REXML is great, by the way. The speed issues I've encountered with it are the same limitations I would expect from any XML lib written in an interpreted language.) So here's how the unit tests looked with REXML:
I spent a few minutes the other night porting the library to use the libxml-ruby bindings. I was surprised by just how much faster the code ran using libxml. Here are the unit tests with libxml (notice the "Finished in..." time):
I've checked the libxml-ruby version into the trunk, but it's not running in production anywhere yet.