• Publish a simple jQuery plugin
• Publish a simple WordPress plugin, probably a widget
• Use MongoDB in a web app project
• Use Redis in a web app project
• Launch another website to the “public” (all 5 readers!)
• Write a simple web app using the Rails 3 beta
• Deploy a Rails app using the bundler gem
• Learn some basic C#

Things I really like:

• Launch speed. Brings up a new instance of a browser at blistering speed. FF3 takes anywhere up to 5-10 seconds for me to launch due to my penchant for extensions.
• Single process per tab. This means that if a given page causes my browser to go haywire, hey, only that tab is lost. Everything else is fine.
• Plugins like Flash also run in a separate process. Again, this helps stability a lot.
• Speed. This browser feels like it’s giving Safari 3.1 a run for the money, and even feels faster than FF3. It makes IE7 and especially IE6 look pretty pathetic. That’s probably because Safari and Chrome both use WebKit as their rendering engine.
• Javascript performance. The browser uses a Javascript virtual machine, and JS code is compiled on the fly to faster VM bytecode. This has resulted in some impressive benchmarks. [See graph here]
• Tab organization. Middle/control-clicking opens a tab to the right of your current tab. For tab-aholics like me, this means that linked article you meant to read is handy and close, not stuck at the end of your huge tab list, lonely and forgotten. Also, if you right-click a tab, you get options to “Close other tabs”, “Close tabs to the right”, and “Close tabs opened by this tab“. Very handy.
• The OmniBar. Search google, history, and bookmarks straight from the URL bar, kind of like the URL bar in FF3, only better executed.

Things I like:

• Integrated Google Gears. Offline support for nearly all Google apps, as well as WordPress, etc.
• Web application links. Create desktop shortcuts to a minimal Chrome window for use on any web app, with special support for Google Apps like GMail.
• Incognito mode, similar to private browsing mode on Safari. Erases all your tracks when the window/tab is closed.

Things I don’t like:

• Memory usage. While I’m not starving for RAM by any stretch of the imagination (work PC/laptop have 2GB, desktop has 4GB) the benefits of running a process per tab means that for a user with tab-addiction, you could eat up 1GB+ of RAM by everyday browsing. Then again, I’ve done that and more with FF3, due in part to my other addiction: extensions. Right now, I’m using ~240MB for 8 tabs, two of which are ~70 each.
• No bookmark bar (that I know of). Does result in a cleaner interface though.
• No extension/theme support yet, but I know it’s in the works.
• The EULA, before they changed it. It used to say that Google pretty much owned everything you do inside a Chrome window.
• Missing OSX/Linux builds.
• No “master password”-type security setting.

Things I really don’t like:

• Nothing!

For those of you who are running Redmine on Phusion Passenger, if you have certain versions of the RedCloth gem installed, you are in for some trouble.

I was getting something along the lines of:

Error message:
    superclass must be a Class (Module given)
Exception class:
    TypeError
Application root:
    /var/rails/redmine-0.7

This was on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1, with Apache 2.2.8-1, Ruby Enterprise Edition 080704 (I think), and Passenger 2.0.2, with Redmine from SVN-stable r1729.

A simple solution that worked perfectly for me was to remove ALL version of the RedCloth gem, allowing Redmine to use its own included version of RC.

gem uninstall RedCloth

One of the responses on that bug thread also indicates that gem version 3.0.4 of RedCloth is the most recent version compatible with Redmine, so you could also try using (only) that version.

I’d highly recommend Passenger and RubyEnt for low-volume or even high-traffic production Rails servers. It has greatly simplified my deployment and performance on a VPS with, say, 540MB of RAM is stellar. If you set the idle timeout to something huge, you can get almost Nginx+Mongrel/Thin level performance even on a low-traffic server; otherwise you have to wait a brief time (10-15 seconds) when the app has been idle for a while.

I had been having a lot of trouble using libxml-ruby on Ubuntu Hardy for a hobby project of mine. Any task including libxml calls via require 'xml/libxml' fails with the message:

no such file to load -- libxml_so

To solve this:

sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev
cd /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-0.7.0
sudo ruby ext/libxml/extconf.rb
sudo make; sudo make install

sudo port install id3lib
sudo ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install id3lib-ruby -- --build-flags --with-opt-dir=/opt/local

On the other hand, using 64-bit Vista with SP1, I noticed no appreciable slowdowns with my games, but I have no hard numbers so it’s all subjective. Plus, I was playing a DX10 game I hadn’t played in a long while, or ever on Vista. Hellgate London, if you’re curious. However, it’s quite pretty on DX10, and I was running with maxed settings except AA was on “Medium”.

Also loaded up the Orange Pack along with some other non-graphically-impressive games I had a hankering for, including Space Empires IV & V, and Outpost 2, of all things. A Windows 95 game, FFS!

I think some of the noticeable slowdown here and there on HGL and the Steam games was a harddrive bottleneck. Vista is loaded on my old SATA1.5 120GB. If and when I move it to the new-ish 320GB SATA3 from WestDig, I think games will show themselves to be pretty snappy with 4GB to play with.

Definitely a leap from 32-bit. Only 2.5GB available after XP accounts for my SLI 512MB vidcards. Alt-tabbing on Vista was very quick, much faster than 32-bit XP.

Still playing with the WMP11/Media Center integration with my 360.

I’d like to note that this a legit copy of Vista Ultimate, I have my own (32-bit) copy purchased at a local shop for a reasonable sum. I still need to order my own 64-bit DVD from Microsoft, which they offer as a courtesy for a shipping fee. But I’m using my own CD key.

• Ubuntu Server 8.04 AMD64
• Apache2-prefork 2.2.8
• Passenger 2.0.1
• Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20080624
• Redmine 0.7 stable (SVN r1547)

My apache vhost is as follows:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName dev.shanesveller.com

  DocumentRoot /var/rails/redmine-0.7/public

<Directory "/var/rails/redmine-0.7/public">
   Options FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
</Directory>

  # Custom log file locations
  # ErrorLog  /var/rails/redmine/log/error.log
  # CustomLog /var/rails/redmine/log/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

This allows me to serve my WordPress blog and my Redmine tracker and use about 260MB of RAM. If you take off the buffers and cache memory, it’s actually more like 110MB.

To enable Passenger and RubyEE in Apache, I used the following file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/passenger:

   LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
   PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1
   RailsRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/ruby

The relevant Ubuntu packages are:

apache2 apache2-prefork-dev apache2-mpm-prefork build-essential ruby1.8-dev ruby ri rake irb rdoc libmysqlclient15-dev libopenssl-ruby

This worked for me with mysql installed via macports by the command:

sudo port install mysql5 +server

Source: Code Intensity