Raymond Law

Andrew and I have been working on a new site Dealistic after our work at OnMyList.

We’ve also put up a screencast to show off our features (HUGE thanks to Sherry)

It lets you find deals by specifying a list of tags and it can notify you by email, RSS feed, and/or SMS when new deals appear that match your tags.

We made the site because we often need to find deals on things we want to buy but we spend way too much time looking for irrelevant deals on a lot of different sites. With Dealistic, what you get is what you want.

Never miss a deal because you don’t have time to find it! Just add a tag at Dealistic and we will let you know when a deal that you are looking for appears.

We also have a feedback tool that we hope you can give us suggestions to do better.

Today I was stressed out while working because of the construction drilling noise near my house (I am working from home for Intridea). So I took a break, and tried to make a dessert aka Cold Stone Creamery ’s Strawberry Banana Rendezvous.

Ingredients I used:

• Turkey Hill strawberry ice-cream – not the greatest ice-cream brand but that’s what was on sale at Wegmans last night…
• Hersey chocolate chips
• A few Strawberries
• Half of a banana – I ate the other half separately

I put all these in a bowl and mix it to gether for one minute. The taste comes close. However, it doesn’t resemble ice-cream anymore as I am missing one huge ingredient – the “cold stone.”

I guess the “cold stone” must be needed to keep the ice-cream ice-cream during the mixing process. The result was more like a milk shake than ice-cream. I still ate it all since I am a big ice-cream lover and I couldn’t just throw it away to the trash! I mean, it is going to look like that in my stomach anyway, right?

So if anyone has a substitute for a cold stone, let me know. This is what I think can simulate the “cold stone.”

• Put the bowl in the freezer and take it out only when you are ready to begin the mixing process.
• Take the ice-cream out at the last possible second.
• Surround the bowl with a box of ice.
• It is probably a good idea to max your AC or do this only in the winter. A few degrees below freezing and being outdoor in Canada may help too.

Courtesy of igvita.com

require 'benchmark'

n = 1000000
Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report('copy') { n.times do ; h = {}; h = h.merge({1 => 2}); end }

  x.report('no copy') { n.times do ; h = {}; h.merge!({1 => 2}); end }

  x.report('map(&:id)') do
    n.times do |i|
      h = {}
      h.map(&:object_id)
    end
  end

  x.report('map { |i| i.id }') do
    n.times do |i|
      h = {}
      h.map { |e| e.object_id }
    end
  end
end

In Rails script/console or Ruby 1.9:

>> load '/Users/rlaw/Desktop/bm.rb'
      user     system      total        real
copy  4.000000   0.020000   4.020000 (  4.081549)
no copy  2.780000   0.010000   2.790000 (  2.818923)
map(&:id) 10.880000   0.040000  10.920000 ( 11.094024)
map { |i| i.id }  2.060000   0.020000   2.080000 (  2.178544)
=> []