Using Ruby’s timout to keep the user experience snappy
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006On a my Ruby on Rails based San Francisco Sailing Weather website I make calls out to flickr.rb to retrieve photos.
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Archive for October, 2006
Upgrading to Spring 2.0 and Hibernate 3.2
Thursday, October 19th, 2006Tonight I just completed the upgrade from Spring 1.2 and Hibernate 3.1 to Spring 2.0 and Hibernate 3.2 for work. I was expecting a rough upgrade but was pleasantly surprised how easily it went.
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Xalan XSL transformations in the 1.4 JDK can be VERY slow
Friday, October 13th, 2006At work as part of our XML data feed product we end up doing XSLT transformations on XML files starting a a few MB all the way up to several hundred MB. Using the 1.4.2 JDK it took over 4 days to do the XSL transformation on the largest file so over lunch one day we started brainstorming our troubleshooting approach. When we tried it on the 1.5 JDK the same transformation took a couple of minutes as opposed to 4 days. Talk about an improvement!
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Deferring ad loading on your pages to avoid unnecessary outages
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006At GreatSchools we’ve had 3rd party ad server outages or slowness effectively make our site unusable as users browsers waited for certain ads to render before rendering the rest of the page. I had originally thought just specifying height and width of the div element around the ad would be enough for the browser to move on given a slow ad load but in my tests with various ad servers that turned out not to be the case. After some research I discovered that the trick that some sites (such as Digg.com) employ is called source ordered content where you put the content in the order you’d really like it in (be it for SEO or for deferring ad calls) and then using CSS or Javascript to move it to the proper place.
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