About me

Who am I and why is it so important for you to know who I am?

The question may sound a bit egoistic but I'm OK with that. I'm a Unix/Linux sysadmin turned software developer (call me hacker if you like). I'm what you'd call a whitebeard (as opposed to greybeards, who are even older than whitebeards) in computer years. I'm the kind of a guy you probably don't even know to exists in your corporation.

With 10+ years of proffesional Unix/Linux system administration and 5+ years of various development projects under my belt, I'm the guy you just might need for your next project. And I'm into design now!

Combine Unix/Linux knowledge (clusters, high availability/high performance systems, round the world deployments and such things) with fast and agile development skills in today's most praised programming languages (ruby, python, perl, lisp and some smalltalk) and sense of a good design, you know it's dangerous to have me working for your competition.

Oh, and I also like snorkeling, BBQ and salsa.

Server Push with Rails

The web project I'm currently working on just got server-push enabled live web chat. Whole web thing is written in Rails (with Mongrels, Nginx, Memcached and zillion of gems and plugins) and It's quite amazingly simple. I sure didn't expect it to be so simple and straightforward.

First version of this live web chat was made by using Rails periodically_call_remote helper. Every second a request was dispatched to get the fresh set of chat data. This was banging our server quite hard with few tens of users using different chat rooms. We couldn't scale this way. I found several Rails based (or at least being capable of use within Rails) server push options but one stood out - Juggernaut. It uses Flash to keep connection to the client open, supports sending to individual clients as well as sending to groups of clients (with use of channels).

After deploying Juggernaut based live chat code, server load fall dramatically and web app responsiveness increased. It's probably just my enthusiasm but a whole new dimension of possibilities has occurred to me. Presence information and event based actions are just two of what I think endless array of options available with using push instead of standard poll.

Working with Apple Mac's is easy (or so they say)

Today I watched my new co-worker as he tried to install OS X on his new Mac mini. Cute little box it is. After struggling for about an hour with single input field (a phone number text field, requires 10 digits) which only allows 8 characters, he decided it was time to see what Google has to say about it. Nice catch, Apple. :-)

He somehow found the way to get pass that screen and went on trough the rest of the installation procedure. About 15 minutes later, the process hanged. Not sure why, he started reading the manual. You know, after trying few times and failing it's wise to look up the answer in the manual. Only he found nothing. Another 15 minutes later, he looked at installation CD (or maybe DVD...) and found big patch of grease on it. And it was originally packed within the cardboard box. Go figure.

About two hours later he was finally ready to do some real, money bringing work. And from this point on his Mac was working flawlessly. He was smiling again.

I (still...) have no first hand experience with Apple computers. After seeing this guy struggle for at least three (3) hours with his brand new Mac mini, I must say I have some doubts about buying one. I mean, for a 12 year Unix/Linux veteran, installing and working with Mac should be like being on a vacation. And since I'm leaving for San Francisco in a few days, not buying one will probably be a huge temptation.

On seeing Apple, Google, Yahoo! and Y Combinator

On 7th of August I'm flying to US to see San Francisco and hopefully Los Angeles. It's almost 24 hour trip from Slovenia (southern Europe) and I'll take 10 days to see the companies I read about on almost daily basis. Who knows, maybe I'll even run into Steve or Larry or Sergey or Paul. I'd realy like to meet anyone of them.