Archive for the_time('F Y')


12 March 2006 in Code | Comments (3)

Last week Andrew gave a few of us a run down on how he was using Ruby on Rails (RoR) for a few small projects. I already knew that RoR was a reasonably efficient way of developing database driven websites but I didn’t realise just how good it was.

So this weekend I decided to throw away my InstantRails package and install it all properly. InstantRails is a cool all-in-one package you can download that sets up MySQL, Apache and RoR when you run it up (and then closes them when you close it – no messy resources being taken up, nice). However now I wanted to do things properly.

So I downloaded Gems (the Rails package manager), MySQL (my host uses that, but I could have used my existing SQL Server instance), Ruby. Everything went swimmingly – almost.

I ran into a small problem with a couple of errors when doing some things that seemed to relate to ssleay32.dll. After some reading I found it also included the file libeay32.dll. From what I read they need to be manually put into your System32 directory on Windows 2003 although it could affect other operating systems versions.

I thought I’d post this entry mainly for myself when in the future I go to setup RoR again and need those dlls I can just download them here. Download libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll.

So now I’m just tinkering with some code – perhaps more RoR posts will follow :-)

- JD

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 168 user reviews.


6 March 2006 in Code | Comments (1)

A sorting algorithm that beats QuickSort (for those collections that don’t have maximum entropy) has just come out of the woodwork. The fact that a betteralgorithm was found is interesting in itself but what is far more interesting is how it came about.

A group have developed a tool called “Critticall”. In their own words it’s “A programming tool, which enables you to apply the Darwinian force to algorithms”. So basically it applies a generticalgorithm to develop better solutions for fundamental computer science algorithms. It’s quite cool that people are starting to apply genetic programming in ways that provide real solutions* (as opposed to the million and one examples where they’re used to find the shortest path between two points).

Source: Critticall homepage

- JD

* I realise they are used in other industries a bit but I don’t know too much about that, it’s nice that it’s being applied in my field of work :)

Average Rating: 5 out of 5 based on 220 user reviews.


6 March 2006 in Business | Comments (2)

The New Zealand web success story that is Trademe has been sold for an amazing 700million dollars!

It’s great to see this sort of value being placed on a New Zealand technology company :-) Things are looking rosey for the NZ IT industry.

Congrats to the whole team :-)

Full Story: Fairfax acquires TradeMe for $700 million

- JD

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 214 user reviews.


6 March 2006 in Blogging | Comments (3)

In the weekend I updated the theme for my blog. I’ll hopefully tweak it a wee bit over the next week or two.

Let me know what you think :-)

- JD

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 based on 295 user reviews.


2 March 2006 in Google & Search Technology | Comments (0)

At the moment if you want to find out where you rank for certain terms you have to use tools that brute force check for a position. This isn’t a very nice way of doing the search and means you could be missing terms that are actually useful for you.

Google SiteMaps has recently been updated to display the search position of terms used to find your site. For example, I can see that for the “Consolas Font” I’m the 6th result – nice.

If you don’t already use Google SiteMaps you really should. It’s not the sexiest service (not like Google Analytics!) but it does provide some real information about your site. Most plug-in enabled products (like WordPress, what I use for my blog) have available plug-ins to get SiteMaps working in under five minutes.

- JD

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 based on 294 user reviews.