As I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday and Saturday I spent some quiet time rewriting parts of the home monitoring software, but before I write up something about the details I;d better describe some of the high level details

(Click for larger image)

On the right hand side are a large number of jeenodes and other nodes with a variety of sensors.

I've been spending the day testing out various cache models for speeding up my rails application, and so far I have tried a large number of gems that all seem to have stopped working with the introduction of Rails3.

So I have ended up rolling my own based on ActiveSupport::Cache - not as automated as the original gems I looked at (and wasted most of the day testing), but then again I can probably make it much faster by writing it specifically for my own application.

First cut is working with our Memcache server at the moment (yes the house has it's own Memcache server) - and it works incredibly fast!

I have played around the the Drupal Cache module - and could not even get it started with the default (simplest comfiguration when used according to the documentation.

The original states:

Installation
1. Enable "Cache" (from "Cache" package) module on
Admininster -> Site building -> Modules page.

2. SETUP WEB-SITE'S settings.php CONFIGURATION FILE

Add the following lines to your settings.php:

I downloaded and compiled Varnish 2.04 and compiled it successfully on OsX today - so far so good.

But then I tried using some of my old VCL snippets and the code errored out with messages like this :

sh-3.2# ./varnish_test.csh

Expected action, 'if' or '}'

(active.vcl Line 54 Pos 9)

   return (pass);

--------######--------

and so on.It turns out that a bug seems to have been introduced, and contrary to what is in the "default.vcl" file you can not use the "return (pass)" but just "pass", and things start working again...