I recently received some code to translate certain non-ascii codes in your article titles into a more URL-friendly permalink. Though, at David Black’s suggestion, I decided to use Iconv instead. Seeing that I’m creating permalinks in several projects now, I’ve extracted this into a new rails plugin: permalink_fu.

Let me know how this works out. Hopefully iconv is available on your platform too. It’s my understanding that it’s in the ruby standard library, and included with the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows users.

I do not know if anyone noticed this; but there was an incompatible change from MySQL 5.1.22 to 5.1.23 in mysql_com.h file for NET structure by renaming the members last_errno and last_error to client_last_errno and client_last_error. This is really annoying as it not just breaks the compilation of lot of depending applications; and functionality will be annoy if one uses the wrong client library as there is no protocol version change. The change should have been done in alpha or beta code but not when its tagged as Release Candidate (RC). The change history does not even have a clue of this change.

Now; I noticed that in 5.1.24 the change is reverted back. I guess someone should be very careful when changing any structures related to the protocol as it could break the things silently.

Just a quick headsup. Francis worked on 7510 which resulted in a minor API change for 0.5 nightlies.

Specifically, the bug addressed making the 'playable media link' effect generic, so rather than just showing in bold, it would actually change classes so that Featherers can style to their liking. (<blink/> FTW!!!)

The side effect this had is that where previously the style could be set by a remote (faceplate.status.style remote), the type should now be set by setting faceplate.status.type. And instead of targeting the faceplate.status.override.style, they should target faceplate.status.override.type.

The 3 types available are: normal, playable, and report.

normal is used for normal links, playable is used for links to media that Songbird can play, and report is used for temporary statusbar overrides, e.g. when reporting the result of drag and drop operations.

I just committed a change to Mephisto that makes Image Science the new default thumbnailer, instead of RMagick. What is Image Science?

ImageScience is a clean and happy Ruby library that generates thumbnails—and kicks the living crap out of RMagick. Oh, and it doesn’t leak memory like a sieve. :)

All I used RMagick for was thumbnailing. It seemed to wreak havoc with your memory, especially on shared hosts, so I commonly recommended disabling RMagick. In a few local tests, I watched the memory jump up to about 90MB from uploading < 1MB of images with RMagick. Yikes. ImageScience tears through them without much of a blip in memory usage.

Course, since no ruby host has ImageScience and FreeImage installed probably, you probably won’t see any benefits. Don’t worry, it should drop back to RMagick if it’s not installed, and should skip thumbnailing altogether if RMagick isn’t installed. You can customize this in environment.rb now too: ASSET_IMAGE_PROCESSOR = :image_science || :rmagick || :none (Only add :image_science, :rmagick, or :none).

Let me know how it works out. Also, I’d try hitting up your hosts and seeing if they’re up for installing FreeImage and ImageScience. I hope so, this covers probably the majority of RMagick usage, which is widely known to cause problems on shared hosts.