Will’s Web Miscellany

This is easy right?  Can’t you just restart the memcached server? Well yes, but you may cause errors in applications that are already connected to it. You can follow your memcached restart with an application restart, eg for a Ruby on Rails app:

# /etc/init.d/memcached restart && mongrel_rails cluster::restart

Of course if you have more than one application server you have to restart your app on every single one. This would work on an engineyard slice assuming you have the eycap gem installed:

$ cap production memcached:restart
$ cap production mongrel:restart

Restarting your application is not ideal however, you will lose anything cached in memory, cause delays to users trying to access your site, that sort of thing.

So what can be done? The answer is really simple. Assuming a memcached running on the local machine on the default port:

$ echo ”flush_all” | nc localhost 11211

Easy!

I despair of eBay, and the internet in general. How did these not sell? How?

I mean, who wouldn’t want 8 mouse balls, especially when posed so artfully.  They are pleasantly rubbery, quite heavy; obviously good quality. Someone missed a bargain today, they really did.

Really, who thought “Penetrating Wagner’s Ring” was a good title for a book?

The reviews are great:

As implied by the title, this collection probes deeply into Wagner’s vast Ring piece. Accusations of anti-semitism make Wagner’s Ring a sensitive area today, but it continues to offer pleasure to many. This is a masterful work of musical scholarship that deserves a place on any sturdy shelf. No doubt it will influence appreciation of Wagner’s Ring for many years to come. Among the highlights is the revealing chapter on the many characters than Wagner has managed to cram into his Ring. Also covered are the brass instruments that Wagner designed specifically for insertion within the Ring. There will always be those who are opposed to musical analysis (just the same as there will always be those who resort to juvenile humour, regarding the title). They will say that Wagner’s Ring is ‘violated’ with excessive force of scholarship. For this reviewer, however, Wagner’s Ring remains quite intact and is indeed tightened by the exploration. In short, this stimulating venture in and out of Wagner’s Ring has resulted in a seminal, fluid output.

More amazon weirdness.

Who doesn’t?

After installing Chyrp today for a client I came across the following two options for saving a post right next to each other:

There was no indication that they worked at all differently and in the end I chose the green-ticky-save over official-looking-DB-and-disky save. I am not sure there would have been much difference in the outcome, but I feel empowered from having the choice.

I have recently been playing with Asaph, a new blogging system and I have a new blog up.  It is seriously fast to post to and limits each post to a small amount of text or one image which although a limitation has been making me think more about what I post.Try it, it’s fun. 

Thanks to all the people who emailed about the release of the Recycling Group Finder, it was great to receive so many positive comments!

Due to popular request there are two new features. First, group member numbers are automatically updating. This takes a maximum of about 48 hours or so to update, so don’t worry if your membership numbers have changed and the new figure isn’t appearing on the site, it will.

Second is the group owner/moderator admin section. If you are a group moderator you can now signup to edit details of your group including member numbers, name and location. To start just enter your yahoo group URL, or find your group on the site and follow the link included with the rest of the group information.

Comments and feedback welcome as always!

It is my pleasure to announce the Recycling group finder, Something I have been working on for the past couple of weeks with my wonderful employer 29degrees. For those of you who don’t know, Freecycle is a worldwide recycling network, in their own words:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,205 groups with 4,211,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people).

As the name suggests, Freecycle Group Finder is a new way to find Freecycle groups.

Finding a group - the old way

To find a group you enter a location to search for in the box on the Freecycle homepage. I live in Romiley, so I enter that and click search. But it can’t find any groups!

In order for it to find my local group I would have to guess it was called ‘Stockport‘ and search for that. I could have used the Freecycle group browser but who browses anymore? People demand search! I wanted to make this better so I wrote the Recycling Group Finder.

Finding a group - the finder.overcycle.com way

Just enter any location into the search box on the homepage and it will find all your local groups:

The Freecycle search gets it right sometimes. Take a search for Alameda, CA. It lists all the groups nearby, but Freecycle Group Finder does better. Freecycle Group Finder shows you a map of where all the local groups are! It lets you scroll around and visually determine the closest group (Try it for yourself!). An improvement we feel, and one that will help more people join up and start recycling.

What keeps it rolling?

At 29degrees we’re big fans of Ruby on Rails. It helps us make web applications faster, and with more fun, and it was no exception for the Freecycle Group finder. We are using Postgres for the database and serving it all with mongrel and of course Apache. Of course if wouldn’t be anwhere near as good if it wasn’t for Tony, 29degrees co-founder and designer extroadinaire!

Monkey tennis bum gravy

Hilarious.