Sharing a Session between multiple subdomains/rails-apps is quite easy.

Make shure you're using the ActiveRecord (db-based) session store and all instances share the same secret (- obviously the same db, too). In config/environment.rb (config-block):

  config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store #store session in db
  config.action_controller.session = {
	:session_key => '_MYWEBAPP', #has to mach over all instances
	:secret      => 'mysecretmysecretmysecret' #has to mach over all instances
  }

Tell rails to set the session-cookie on "all subdomains" by adding this line to config/environments/myenvironment.rb. Note the leading dot in ".mydomain.com".

	ActionController::Base.session = { :domain => '.mydomain.com' }

(Apprently this works only for rails >= 2.3)

Playing MP3 from a http source (fake streaming) is quite easy in AS3. It's all done by the flash.media.Sound class.

var mySound:Sound = new Sound;
mySound.load(new URLRequest(myFileURL));
mySound.play();			

One possible pitfall (It took me a few minutes to figure this out): The stop()-method and position-property are not part of Sound, but rather SoundChannel.

var mySoundChannel:SoundChannel;
mySoundChannel = mySound.play();			

Stopping the playback:

private function stopPlayback:void(){
	mySoundChannel.stop();
	try{
		mySound.close();	
	} catch(error:IOError) { ... }			
}

The volume can be set by assigning a SoundTransform object:

soundtransform = new SoundTransform(0.75, 0);
mySoundChannel.soundTransform = soundtransform;

Note: The Sound class can't load a second file after one has been played. To play another file instantiate a new Sound object.

This is great! With the Talentsuche.de RubyOnRails app growing the mongrel development server was getting slow and slower. Lately a request took up to 3000ms - that's unusable for front end development.

But there is quick way to speed this up. Mongrels default behaviour is to listen on all interfaces/addresses (0.0.0.0). By setting a single ip you can make it a lot faster.

 ./script/server -b 10.23.23.23 -p 3000

Apparently facebook's autocomplete-script for the friends search returns data it's not supposed to.

Even hidden profiles's friends are revealed. All you need is the profiles uid, which is public.

 (...)

The url of the php script is:

 http://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead_friends.php?u=*******&__a=1