On NetTuts.com they've posted a tutorial showing you how to create a real-time chat system using Laravel 5, Modulus and Pusher (with a PostregSQL backend).

In this tutorial, I will show you how to implement a real-time chat application with Laravel 5, PostgreSQL, and Pusher. Then we will deploy this application to Modulus together. We will use Laravel 5 for the back-end service, HTML5 and jQuery for a simple front-end application, PostgreSQL for the database, and Pusher for real-time communication between the server and clients.

They start with the scenario they want to solve and a look at the overall architecture of the solution. Then they start setting up the software and services needed to bring it all together:

• installing a fresh copy of Laravel (as a project)
• setting up a new database using the ElephantSQL service
• creating a Pusher account and the credentials you'll need for the application
• creating an Nginx configuration for the Modulus setup

Next comes the design of the application, creating the models for message data (author, content, etc) and the simple controller to handle the requests. They show how to configure the connection to Pusher and build the routes for getting, listing and saving messages. Finally they create the view complete with Javascript to connect it to Pusher and transfer messages back and forth. All that's left then is the deployment using the modulus command line tool (installed via npm).

James Cohen has a quick post about what he calls a "poor man's parallelization" for working with batch jobs. It takes in parameters that tell it which set of jobs to run through when looping.

One common problem that I’ve seen time and time again with batch processing jobs (generally cronjobs) is that when they’re written they run quickly. Over time their workload grows until eventually it’s unacceptably slow. [...] To create a simple of way of separating the jobs in a consistent way we can use the modulus operator. It just calculates the remainder of two numbers. It’s a common arithmetic operator in almost all languages so this technique is pretty portable.

His proof-of-concept script takes in two parameters, the starting job number and the number to increment. His example is user IDs, but this type of script could be used for anything with an ID number. The script is then run from the command line with the parameters of your choosing.