Janeiro de 2011

Pelo que consegui pesquisar, em 27 de dezembro de 2006 o Discovery Channel apresentou o documentário “The iPod Revolution: Inside Story of the Apple iPod and Steve Jobs”.

Esse documentário é muito bem produzido, em 40 minutos ele resume a história da Apple de 1997 até 2006, cobrindo quase uma década desde o retorno de Steve Jobs à Apple, ao lançamento do iPod e ao gigantesco sucesso do iTunes Music Store. E isso é só metade da história já que o iPhone só viria a ser revelado em Janeiro de 2007, ou seja a história é ainda maior.

Sempre recomendo pesquisar essa história porque ela é muito interessante e engajante. Para mais detalhes leiam os livros:

• The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness – do Steven Levy.
• The Cult of the iPod – do Leander Kahney que também aparece no documentário.
• iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business – do Jeffrey Young e Willian Simon.

Como eu sempre mostro esse vídeo aos meus amigos que ficam interessados resolvi que passou da hora de legendar (nem todo mundo que mostro é da área de tecnologia e, pra variar, inglês é um problema, mas isso é outro assunto). Se estiverem interessado no arquivo de legenda, criei um Gist com ele. Para legendar usei o Miyu. Para renderizar a legenda no vídeo usei o Submerge e finalmente subi na minha conta no Blip.tv. Assistam a seguir:

Last time I described the advantages of replacing my old 320Gb 5400rpm HDD for a brand new 240Gb OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. Everything is noticeably snappier and way more comfortable to use.

But there is one big disadvantage: going down from 320Gb to 240Gb is huge. I was already lacking space when I had only 320Gb. Having 80Gb less is painful. There are at least 4 areas that eat up a lot of disk space:

• iTunes
• iPhoto
• iMovie
• Virtual Machines

I moved all I could to an external hard drive, but it is very uncomfortable to plug an external box to my machine every time. It defeats the whole purpose of the mobility of a notebook.

That’s when someone recommended the MCE Optibay. The idea is so simple that I can’t understand why people don’t talk about it more.

Upgrade: There have been some confusion because of the faulty way I wrote the conclusion. If you read it you will get under the impression that I ran the tests using Rails’ development mode, which is known to not be used for testing and profiling. I know that, of course. When I say “production environment”, I mean my VPS machine where my application is hosted. And when I say “development environment”, I mean my Macbook Pro, that I use for development. That’s the confusion :-)

This is not news but I tried to do a small test with my own Enki-modified blog upgraded to Rails 3.0.3 made compatible with both Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) 1.8.7 2010.02 and Ruby 1.9.2-p136.

Many micro-benchmarks show that Ruby 1.9.2 eats 1.8.7 for lunch. But the reality of a full featured Rails 3 application may be different.

I tested both using the Passenger 3 Standalone and simple local httperf. This is not an optimum environment for benchmarking but we can have a broad idea.

In terms of memory usage, 1.9.2 is a bit lighter. passenger-memory-stats shows that each Ruby process is consuming an average of 74MB of RAM. The REE version consumes around 106MB. So 1.9.2 is doing a better job in memory consumption.

I’ve been waiting to do this upgrade once prices for reasonably sized SSDs became more affordable. I have bought the OCZ Vertex 2 240Gb (Firmware 1.24) which is good enough at around USD 450 at Amazon. There is at least one other model you should consider: some say that the Crucial RealSSD C300 256Gb is a bit better. Reviews are mixed though, so you can’t go wrong if you buy any of those.