Patrick Bacon on Atomic Spin

Grade School Math – I’m Doing It Wrong?

An explanation of the Lattice Multiplication Method and the Partial Quotients Division Method.

Software Science

Return From a Finally Clause?

A return statement in a finally clause can lead to exceptions being silently discarded in Java, JavaScript, and Ruby (and likely others).

Web Apps

Detecting LESS Changes with Middleman

How to use Guard and Foreman to prototype with Middleman and LESS so that changes to imported LESS files are picked up automatically.

Ruby

Setting a Socket Connection Timeout in Ruby

How to use the Socket class' connect_nonblock method paired with IO.select to set a connection timeout for a Ruby socket.

Ruby

Using Regular Expressions to Validate an IP Address in Ruby

Ruby's standard library includes regular expressions to validate an IP address. The Resolv standard library includes a regex for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

DevOps & System Admin.

Multiple Ubuntu Installations with Grub

The steps I used to configure a small Grub partition used to chainload multiple Ubuntu installations on separate partitions.

Web Apps

Rake Assets Precompile with JRuby Complete

A quick work-around to get rake assets:precompile to work when using the jruby-complete.jar.

jRuby

Using Bundler with JRuby Complete

How to set up a JRuby project using the jruby-complete.jar using Bundler to manage gem dependencies.

jRuby

Experimenting with Clojure’s PersistentHashMap in JRuby

I benchmarked some tests run in JRuby that compare the Hamsterdam library using Hamster's immutable Hashes vs Clojure's PeristentHashMap, plus some gotchas.

Ruby

Making Refs in Ruby Using Celluloid Actors

An example of using Celluloid Actors to provide a poor man's Ref (Clojure-like) around an immutable data structure in JRuby to protect shared state.

jRuby

JRuby and vlcj – A Simple Full-Screen Media Player

A simple JRuby script showing how to use the vlcj library to playback video full screen on a Linux machine.

jRuby

Preventing JRuby Concurrency Errors with Hamster

How using Hamster's efficient, immutable, thread-safe collections can prevent ConcurrencyError exceptions in JRuby.

Patrick Bacon

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