Monthly archives: August 2011

Introducing TrueCrypt Mounter for OS X

After playing around with using TrueCrypt and syncing the volume over Dropbox I was disappointed to discover that it doesn't let you mount the volume by double clicking on the file. You have to open TrueCrypt, select the file and then type in your password.

To further expand my knowledge of OS X application bundles I set out to write an application that associated with the .tc file extension and when you opened a .tc file it would prompt your for your password and once you are done and eject the disk, automatically dismount the TrueCrypt volume.

The fruit of my labour is available in this GitHub repository and you can download the application here. Once you have copied the application to your Applications directory, it will associate with any *.tc file. You must add this extension to any of your TrueCrypt volumes because (unfortunately) TrueCrypt does not do this for you automatically.

Speeding up jruby with nailgun

I had always wondered why when I installed jruby using rvm it always built something called Nailgun but I never bothered to search about it.

That was a mistake.

Nailgun is an amazing idea that greatly speeds up the start up time of the JVM and subsequently: jruby.

Without Nailgun

$ time jruby -e ''

real        0m1.336s
user        0m2.608s
sys         0m0.205s

With Nailgun

$ time jruby --ng -e ''

real        0m0.265s
user        0m0.001s
sys         0m0.003s

As you can see, nailgun reduced the start up time for jruby by 500%. Now you may be asking "How do I get started using nailgun?". Well, if you are using rvm then all you need to do is enable the after_use_jruby hook which will start up a nailgun server for you.

    chmod +x "$rvm_hooks_path/after_use" "$rvm_hooks_path/after_use_jruby"

And that's all you need to do. rvm jruby or rvm use jruby will now start up a nailgun server if there isn't one running and it set the --ng switch for all jruby runs.

If you aren't using rvm, you will have to compile nailgun and start up a nailgun server with jruby --ng-server. Now whenever you run jruby you just add the --ng switch and it will use the nailgun server. You may want to export JRUBY_OPTS="--ng" to set the switch for all jruby runs.