Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

In Israel

I’m in Israel. Its crazy times.
We saw Masada, the Dead Sea, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. We are staying three blocks from the Mediteranenan.
For day to day reports, you could see Jim’s blog (my Seeking Alpha colleague).
If you haven’t got overseas and you are American, you should do so. As […]

Cleaning ActiveRecord Sessions

We realized recently that we never setup a job to clean up our active record sessions. So this accounts for our database size growing rapidly:

mysql> select count(*) from sessions;
+———-+
| count(*) |
+———-+
| 2188080 |
+———-+
1 row in set (24.64 sec)

Derp!
Not a big deal, really, except for the size its taking up for backups. Its […]

Top 100 Rails Sites

Are here, via the always 100% accurate Alexa rankings. I’m guessing this is already out of date, giving how quickly the Alexa rankings fluctuate.
Something that updated this list continuously would be fun to build.
As provided by PJ’s twitter.
SeekingAlpha will be around #5 on there soon…

My Command line toolkit for Ruby and Linux

Some common aliases and functions that I use, spread across various bash_login and .sh scripts. This excludes a bunch of things that are specific to SeekingAlpha, of course. A lot of this was cobbled together from similar lists and previous coworkers.

# general shortcuts
alias mv='mv -i'
alias cp='cp -i'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias :='cd ..'
alias ::='cd ../..'
alias [...]

Zed and Geoffrey, laying it down, httperf style

I've been waiting for this screencast for awhile. Our team at SeekingAlpha has been doing a ton of work with load testing, performance, and optimization, in both Rails and PHP (ugh). I've used httperf a bit but still don't feel like I really "get it". Its great to see Zed and Geoffrey [...]

Contegix is Amazing. Plus Thoughts on Rails Hosting

I think I've raved before about our experiences at Seeking Alpha with Contegix for our hosting before, but I'm going to do it some more. As of late we've been having problems with our outgoing email for subscription being tarpitted or even blacklisted by certain well known public email companies. Obviously, this is [...]

Five Common Myths about Working From Home

I've been working (programming) from home since April with Seeking Alpha, and its been a lot of fun. I've discovered the true value of being free of distractions, as a phone call or annoying pet can break flow and burn ten minutes. I've also learned just how much more productive I can be [...]

Launching Feels Good

It feels good to launch these new forums for Seeking Alpha. Its a modified Beast installation, with a bunch of hackery going on so it understands our old user system. Beast is a really great Rails forum, with a clean look and nice use of ajax done in under 500 lines of code [...]

Seeking Alpha now carried by Yahoo! Finance

Today was a great day for Seeking Alpha (ie my employer). Our content is now carried by Yahoo Finance (details here). Kudos go to Dion and Jim moreso then me. I've been working on Rails-ication of the back end, and also integration of some other Ruby pieces, so I haven't really done [...]

Rails Conf 2006, this blog, and biking

Jim and I leave here in about six hours to try and beat the rush hour traffic to Chicago for Rails Conf. I should probalby try to get some sleep. I'll try to cover the event for Ajaxian, tho I'm not sure how much true ajax related content there will be. I [...]