Today at work I ran into a nasty gotcha with network socket I/O in Windows.

Now that I have Azureus mostly running on Ubuntu, I’ve been focusing on integrating the machine into my download/watch/archive pipeline.

Back when I ran BT on a Windows XP box, I kept a drive mapped to my media share on nemes, my 2TB NAS box. Whenever a download finished, I’d copy it over to that share. Now that BT is running on Linux, I want much the same functionality.

I’m working on adding support for Microsoft Exchange clusters to the next version of my company’s product. In order to do that, I need to have an Exchange cluster to develop/test on. Ironically, assembling Windows machines into a cluster seems to decrease their stability at an exponential rate.

Last time, I encountered horrifying performance with my Ruby extension, and had two action items:

• Build Ruby from sources so I’d have debug information
• Profile my extension using Intel VTune

I was actually shocked how easy it was to build Ruby from sources. Under windows it’s literally just:

 win32\configure
 nmake
 nmake test
 nmake DESTDIR=foo install

In the previous episode, I was struggling with the Ruby extension build environment on Windows. I finally gave up and created a Visual C++ 2005 project that built the extension, and wrote a post-build step to copy the files into the Ruby install directory. Obviously this is a short-term hack; I’ll need to get something that will build on *NIX, but I don’t want to spend any more time on the fucking build environment right now.

In my quest to wrap Wireshark to dissect packet captures into something Ruby can handle, I’ve eliminated the PDML export option, and am now trying to write a Ruby C extension to wrap the Wireshark libraries.