loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).
Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).
After a short time of writing our loops in more organized ways we were able to generalize most of the loops code so now our loops look like a classes with a single mandatory public method called run. Everything else (spawning many workers, managing them, logging, backgrounding, pid-files management, etc) is handled by the plugin itself.
The major idea behind this small project was to create a deadly simple and yet robust framework to be able to run some tasks in background and do not think about spawning many workers, restarting them when they die, etc. So, if you need to be able to run either one or many copies of your worker or you do not want to think about re-spawning dead workers and do not want to spend megabytes of RAM on separate copies of Ruby interpreter (when you run each copy of your loop as a separate process controlled by monit/god/etc), then I’d recommend you to try this framework — you’ll like it.
For more information, visit the project site and, of course, read the sources 
Few days ago we were chatting in our corporate Campfire room and one of the guys asked me what do I think about Rails developers hiring process, what questions I’d ask a candidate, etc… This question started really long and interesting discussion and I’d like to share my thoughts on this question in this post.
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Since I wasn’t able to get to this year’s MySQL UC (employer change caused problems with US visa obtaining and I didn’t get visa in time) I’m really interested in all presentations people are posting after their sessions. I decided to collect them all in one place and would like to share with others – maybe someone will find it interesting to read what people have to say about many interesting aspects of MySQL usage.
So, I’ve created a folder in my Scribd.com account which you could use (and track using RSS readers) to find out what interesting presentations were published. You can use either my account or mysqluc08 folder there. One more possible option to track mysqluc presentations/documents is using our tagging (I tag all my docs with mysqluc08 tag).
Thanks to MySQL community members we’ve got really great collection of media files from the recent mysqluc. Thanks to Seeri for all that work he’s done to collect everything in one place so we could watch/listen/read information from this great event.
So, if you did not attended mysqluc07, then you definitely should visit Technocation page, dedicated to this conference.
P.S. I’m going to post links to these videos and descriptions for the sessions on the Best Tech Videos soon, so If you are not sure to watch some video or not, just wait while I’m merging these links with information from mysqluc site.
I think nobody would argue today, that search engines are most import sites in todays Internet. There are lots of information sources in the Net today, and every day they are generating lots of useful content. One of major parts of this content is generated by forums aka bulletin boards. But Google – most popular search engine is not to efficient on this side of search – if you try to find something using Google, you can find information on some public forum, but Google SERP is designed for generic pages search and search results will be not so clear. That is why more specialized search engines are so popular. Technorati, Google and Yahoo blog search engines, etc are really popular today.
Just few days ago new search engine was released. Its name is Board Reader. IMHO, its major advantage of this search engine is specialization on search by forums. Its SERP has been designed to display search results in really convenient way which is specific for forums (message threading model). Its index is not littety by all these doorway sites, etc, etc. So, I think this site would grow really fast especially if they would keep working on their services extending. As for me, I’d like to give them a try and will use this search engine for my forums specific search requests.
Today I dugg interesting site with not so many, but useful books about programming. There are 18 different sections all if which contains free books about some programming language.
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Red Hat company has recently opened its Knownedge Base – great collection of answers to frequently asked questions about linux systems. You no longer need to login to access it.
Red Hat Knowledgebase is a library of tips, troubleshooting advice, and current information updated daily by Red Hat technicians.
As for me, it is great news, because RHKB is one of the best libraries with information about linux systems.
Some days ago I came across interesting resource from Google. They are providing free access to video recordings from the some of their Educational seminars.
As far as I understand, these seminars has been provided by Google for their staff and now all of us can get them via Google Video service.
By the way, when I have decided to view some of that interesting seminars, it was not wery confortable for me to view them in browser window… and I have googled 
for some method to save video from google to local disk. As the result of my seraching, I got great service, that allows saving any clip from Google Video, Youtube or iFilm services to local disk!
And now, you have link to very interesting collection of video clips and you know the metod how to save it to local disc… the last I need to do is to say: “Happy viewing!”
First of all, I really glad to know, that one of my favorite Firefox plugins – Web Developer Toolbar – became one of the winners in Extended Firefox plugins Contest. Congratulations to Chris Pederick!
By the way, in this post I have decided to describe the list of my favorite plugins, because I think, it may be interesting for some of my readers.
Here is complete list of plugins in my Firefox installation:
- Live HTTP Headers – the best Firefox plugin for web server admins and web developers! Allows viewing HTTP headers of current page and shows them while page is loading.
- Web Developer – great plugin for web developers with many different options like HTML and CSS validation, control of JavaScript execution, HTML outline, cookies control and many other options.
- HTML Validator – really good Tidy-based plugin for run-time HTML code validation (some times can help to find annoying errors in HTML-code).
- Google Toolbar for Firefox – very useful toolbar from Google. Consists of search request field, pagerank monitor, spell checking button, and list of last searched keywords.
- Session Saver – saves all of the opened windows and tabs between Firefox restarts (like Opera does).
- Search Status – shows current page/site rank in Google and Alexa.
- deli.cio.us – plugin to keep, share and discover my favorite bookmark with deli.cio.us service.
- Adblock – plugin to filter ads from webpages.
- FlashGot – I’m using this plugin to integrate Firefox with my favorite download manager Download Master.
- FasterFox – performance tweaks and page download timer for Firefox.
- IE Tab – plugin for integration of the Internet Explorer into the Firefox tabs.
- PDF Download – very interesting plugin, that allows user to select preferred action for PDF files (view in browser, download, save to disk).
- Clear Cache Button – very useful plugin for purging Firefox cache by one toolbar button click.
- Disable Targets for Downloads – small plugin, that prevents download links opening new blank windows.
- Last Tab – Allows tab navigation in a most recently used manner (after closing some tab, selects last opened tab, not closest on tab bar).
- New Tab Button on Tab Bar – small plugin adds “New Tab” button to the tab bar and allows to browse without keyboard using.
- Customize Google – adds some useful elements to Google search results (such as links to results in another search engines).
- Omea Connector – adds some useful actions to Firefox, allowing to integrate it with my favorite RSS-aggregator Omea Reader.
Today I decided to write about some of my favourite podcasts which I’m using for improving my English level (listening comprehension). All of these resources are specialized ESL (English as a Second Language) podcasts hosted by English professionals and native speakers.
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