Patrick Tulskie

Update: Aaron told me that he is going to be re-running the benchmarks this weekend so we’ll get a more complete set of data from the machine that originally ran the tests.

If you’re into parsing XML or HTML with ruby then chances are you’re familiar with the various gems out there for getting the job done.  Lately, there have been a lot of things flying around about which is the fastest and to settle it, Aaron Patterson (author of Nokogiri and Mechanize) wrote a test suite.

After it’s release, RubyInside posted about how the tests showed how fast Nokogiri was compared to Hpricot in this article here: Ruby XML Performance Shootout: Nokogiri vs LibXML vs Hpricot vs REXML.  Later in the day, I saw Why’s posting about the release of Hpricot here: hpricot 0.7 and decided to modify Aaron’s tests to use Hpricot.XML and here are the results:
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Welcome back to the saga of Patrick’s battle with the Chinese.  When we left our hero, he thought he had battled off the Chinese internet registrar and the government in a few short emails.  Alas, he was wrong.  Carol had one more thing to attempt to sell to him.  Sensing that this was a scam of some sort, and not really caring about who looks at his lowly blog in China, he decided it would be fun to start messing with them.

If you haven’t read the previous posting about this nonsense then you should probably do so.  Basically a Chinese company contacted me with some nonsense about someone wanting to buy my name in China and wanted to know if I would allow this.  I said no, and they started trying to convince me to register the names with them… and then this happened…

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UPDATE: I had taken this down since I didn’t want to blow my cover but it looks like they realized I was onto their game.  I believe this company that has contacted me is actually just trying to screw people in other countries out of money by threatening them with fake companies.  If that’s not the case and they are reading this then I’d like to see some proof otherwise.  The rest of the emails will come shortly when I have time.

I know.  I know.  There are plenty of questions going through your head right now upon reading the title of this… How could this possibly happen?  Why do they want some Irish/Polish mixed name?  Don’t they have enough to do with the Olympics this year?  How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop?

Well, I’m as bewildered as you are.  Let me start at the beginning since it was only this morning and I am pretty sure I can re-count it.

I woke up to my blackberry going off next to me for an emergency email.  No one sends me emergency emails, with the exception of the Chinese government, so naturally I had a look see.  I skimmed it quickly and determined it could wait until morning because they did not say anything about me needing to wake up immediately and get dressed.

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