Category Archives: Technology

Hosting Cautions

Technology

I saw an ad on my site today for ServerPronto. I’m always on the lookout for better hosting deals, since hosting is expensive. They looked good — inexpensive dedicated colocation. So I quickly googled for “ServerPronto Debian”. It turns out that ServerPronto has run afoul of several spam RBL lists and generally refuses to remove spammers from their network. Result: you’ll have a lot of trouble sending e-mail from a box hosted there. On the other hand, there’s at least one person happy with them. I wonder if they’ve cleaned up their act since last July?

I did some more googling and found a nice personal colo chart. I found a few interesting ones, including OSEM here.

Today’s Reading

General, Hardware

Apple: iPod Domination Or Just Another Fad? at The Register.

Various SELinux material from Gentoo. Also, Getting Started with SELinux and Writing SELinux Policy. SELinux looks very complex. I think I’ll just use vserver instead.

The System Rescue CD and Partimage pages. The system rescue C looks like it can pretty much eliminate the need for spending money on Partition Magic or Ghost because of its inclusion of qparted and partimage. Nice!

Today’s Reading

General, Technology

Here’s what I’ve been reading today:

Hackers, Slackers, and Shackels by Matt Barton, a fascinating article about trends in game development. The author calls Martin Luther “the Richard Stallman of his time.” That’s one analogy I hadn’t heard of before. (seen on Slashdot) Also a bit of insight into the history of Unix I hadn’t heard of before, either.

Personal Chemistry and the Healthy Body by Gerald Weinberg, (via Slashdot). Seems like sound enough conclusions, with some rather mushy in-between stuff.

Review of Author Unknown by Foster. Foster attempts to identify the authors of various bits of text. Seen on a comment from Jon on an earlier story here.

Haskell: My New Favorite Language

Programming

I discovered Haskell not long ago. I even wrote a bit about my initial impressions of it.

This is an amazing language. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much fun programming. The Haskell community is also great; there are more geniuses there than anywhere I’ve seen before.

If you’re new to Haskell, try reading Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming, 2nd Ed.. Or, if you want something online, try Yet Another Haskell Tutorial.