This week's fun
No big post this week, due to being pretty busy, so instead I'll round up some of the bits and pieces that have occupied my mind this week.
Erlang:
On the Erlang front I'm wading through some slightly less blog-worthy chapters of Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World, getting to grips with error handling and exeptions. I'm going to try and tackle a more unusual task next week.
At work:
I've been wresteling with Servers. One site is flat HTML, and should therefore run super fast - however, due to a huge quantity of internal redirects and a sudden upsurge in traffic the server was grinding to a halt! Solution: move the redirects from .htaccess files over to vhost.conf, but I think they are going to have to be whittled down very soon.
I also set up a CentOS Virtual Machine as a staging/testing environment and was pretty pleased by how much I can get done from memory using the shell. It's a while since I realy played with Linux for more than a couple of hours and I could definitely envisage moving over to it on a more permanent basis. Quite a few dev tasks are easier there.
Personal Projects:
Development on my second web app (the first being Good Baad) is coming together nicely. The working prototype is built with my "ultra-lightweight" PHP MVC framework, which I'll write about some time soon. Although I'm wondering about porting to Erlang as it's a heavily realtime system that could take advantage of Erlang's concurrency.
Random Thought:
I've been worrying about the environmental impact of the web, and most discussions focus on the huge server farms used by mega-sites like Google and Facebook. However, I'm sure that individual developers and small companies could be working more actively on these problems too.
What a dull post! I'll step it up next time, promise. Just to spice things up here's a video of a nutty robot:
