Rails, what were you thinking? You went and wrote your own ridiculous JSON serializer in pure Ruby, when a perfectly good C-extension gem already does the job 20 times faster. What’s worse, you gave your to_json method (which clobbers every innocent object it can get its grubby little hands on) a completely incompatible method signature from the standard gem version. You just can’t mix the two, which is ALL KINDS OF FUN for those of us who need to push more than 10 reqs/sec.

Then there’s awesome behavior like this:

I’ve updated Sequenceable with new code supporting restriction of sequences to subsets through some sneaky SQL merging, ellipsized pagination (“1 … 4, 5, 6 … 10”), and proper handling of multiple sort columns.

Ruby on Rails is much, much, slower than I would like. It takes around .25 seconds to render the index page: about 10 times longer than Ragnar. I've alleviated the problem somewhat by switching to a Mongrel cluster with Apache's mod-balancer, but performance is still slow. I can't add any more foreign key constraints--pretty much every feasible relationship is locked down. I guess it's just down to ActiveRecord tuning, and figuring out how to make ERB run with any semblance of speed. Possibly memcached, too...

Anyway, sorry for the inexplicable downtime. Things are still moving around quite a bit.

So I'm back at work again, but my job has changed. No longer am I the stealthy IT ninja, whose responsibility it is to replace components the day before they they break, anticipate obscure printer errors that could bring ruin to the marketing department, repair desktops while their users are out for a cup of coffee, and arrive silently in an employee's cube before they hang up the phone. I'm still messing about with the network monitoring system (especially the TAP gateway, which fails silently half the time), but my official job is now within the realm of support. Working against time on a laptop with a failing hard drive, I'm writing a support web site with the Ruby on Rails framework which will interface with our customer relations management service.

Let me tell you this: Ruby. Is. Amazing.