I enjoyed this article on clustering with Ruby: ”Linux Clustering with Ruby Queue: Small Is Beautiful” [via LtU].
Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, has said that “The purpose of Ruby is to maximize programming pleasure”, and experience has taught me that enjoying the creative process leads to faster development and higher quality code. Ruby features powerful object-oriented abstraction techniques, extreme dynamism, ease of extensibility and an armada of useful libraries. It is a veritable Swiss Army machete, precisely the sort of tool one should bring into uncharted territory such as the NFS-mounted priority queue I was seeking to build.
The article also gives a little insight into what it takes to create those satellite views of night-time lights (142 terabytes of intermediate files, among other things).
Posted by jjwiseman at December 30, 2004 12:20 PM