Monthly Archives: November 2009

RightAWS and SSL Certificates

If you’ve used the RightAWS tools to talk to Amazon Web Services, you’ve probably seen this warning before: warning: peer certificate won’t be verified in this SSL session No one likes warnings cluttering up their output, and this one indicates … Continue reading

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Fetching multiple SimpleDB items in a single request

The only way to retrieve multiple items at a time, along with their attributes, from Amazon SimpleDB is with the Select operation. Typically, you query for some property of the items which you want to retrieve, not by item name: … Continue reading

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PC Construction Resources?

(Also posted to Superuser) Hi there lazyweb. A non code-related question today: The last time I built a PC the tricky parts were knowing the difference between ISA, VLB, and PCI cards; juggling IRQs; and getting IDE master/slave right. Now … Continue reading

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Hash Transforms in Ruby

I often find myself wanting to perform some kind of transform on a Ruby Hash which results in another Hash. For instance, converting all keys to strings. Ruby’s built-in Hash methods make this a little inconvenient, because all the standard … Continue reading

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Speed up RightAWS by Enabling libxml

So I was profiling our app the other day and discovered it was spending a significant amount of time in REXML. “REXML?” I thought. “Who uses REXML in 2009?” For anyone who doesn’t know, REXML is Ruby’s standard pure-Ruby XML … Continue reading

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Assertive Code

Trust, but verify Self-confident code does not ask questions about the data given to it. It enforces validity, asserts that its expectations are met, or ignores data which isn’t up to its standards. Previously we’ve looked at some methods for … Continue reading

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The State of SimpleDB Clones

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been updating the DataMapper SimpleDB adapter for DataMapper 0.10, an effort which yesterday culminated in the release of version 1.0.0. Testing against Amazon SimpleDB can be an excruciatingly slow process – not only can … Continue reading

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Why Go Matters

This week Google announced a new systems programming language called “Go”. I know you’re pressed for time and overloaded with information, so let me restate that, with the important bits emphasized: Google announced a new SYSTEMS programming language. See that … Continue reading

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