LoLoCoJr

Got a Linksys WRT54G wireless router installed at home. This thing is running on embbeded Linux. I will have to play with some alternative Linux firmware images. So far I’m really happy with its performance. Getting 54Mbit reception in every corner of the appartement. It also has no problems coping with the 8Mbit DSL line, unlike some other piece of hardware I own.

Fedora Core 4 is the latest version of the free and popular Fedora Core platform with a number of unique features and significant improvements over previous versions. Read the rest of the release notes. Torrents are also available

While playing with the Ajax support in Rails I detected a huge memory leak problem. Apparantly this is a known issue. Fixing it turned out to be quite interesting. The Ubuntu ruby-fcgi packages are still at 0.8.5 so first things first, remove this. Only the rubygems fcgi 0.8.6 version seems to be broken also judging from the apache error logs:

undefined method `each_cgi’ for FCGI:Class [NoMethodError]

Whoops! The correct fix currently is to just build ruby-fci 0.8.6 from source which is pretty straight forward anyway:

# cd /tmp
# wget http://sugi.nemui.org/pub/ruby/fcgi/ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar.gz
# tar zxvf ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar.gz
...
# cd ruby-fcgi-0.8.6
# ruby install.rb config
...
# ruby install.rb setup
...
# ruby install.rb install
...

Unfortunately the memory leak is not really fixed. It leaks a lot less, but it still leaks, even with ruby-fcgi 0.8.6! Or perhaps it’s some kind of interaction with Apache2 + fastcgi. Anyone?

Update: the memory leak seems to happen when Rails is in development mode. Switching to production mode fixes the leak! Thanks to Daath @ #rubyonrails for this observation.

Update2: Rails 0.13.1 fixed this memory leak.

Excellent talk and demo from Will Wright, creator of The Sims, etc. on the upcoming Maxis game “Spore”. Amazing stuff, check it out. He also talks about procedural methods and their demo scene origins. Can’t wait to get my hands on this game.

The NVIDIA folks did it again, 1.0-7664. This release includes EXT_framebuffer_object support which bodes well for the upcoming XGL stuff. Go nVidia! Kudo’s to zander. Another interesting tidbit is that they also released this version for Solaris x86. Nice to see them expanding their cross platform support. Now off to the install.

Okay, so I went and bought the combo pack. Figured it’ll at least keep me busy while recovering from a nasty flu. So far I like it! The appendix on Ruby alone is going to be great as a quick reference. Currently at chapter 4, the juicy details are still to come. Recommended!