Assorted Housekeeping

Quick journal entry time. Not necessarily programming related.

You've been warned.

Still Not Much nix

I still have a few nix-related tabs open in my browser, perpetually waiting for attention. I'll get to them eventually, dammit, but there's entirely too much interesting stuff waiting for the same. For instance, someone slipped me a link to this, which I've been told is a pretty good introductory text for neural networks and associated AI techniques and concepts. There's this, which reduces to a quarter-page kernel a very interesting logic programming language I've been batting around. And there's this (and the associated paper), which seems to be the July sub-goal of the Summer Vision project realized something like 50 years later.

Before I even think about getting to nix and the intricacies of building a persistent package system, I need to absorb enough ideas that I stop feeling like such a CS barbarian.

This does unfortunately mean that I'll be doing slightly less Haskelling for the next little while. Remember, my main reason for using nix is so that I could resolve some of cabals' module interaction problems. I do miss it, but I've got my work cut out for me practicing Clojure and Go for the next little while, in addition to all that reading, so it's not as though I could reasonably pile more work on.

Daedalus Pretty Sweet

Specifically, the quick-play insert for Le Havre is essential. If you own that game and play with any regularity, you need to click that last link and hit the order button|1|. The equivalent inserts for Dead of Winter and Caverna aren't essential, but still pretty cool. And I can't in all honesty recommend the Robinson Crusoe insert, mostly because it's designed to work with Mayfair sleeves and this is a Fantasy Flight household in that regard. YMM, as always, V. There's also a similar family-owned affair that sells similar things over at Insert Here. I can't tell you much about them yet, but am seriously considering placing an order for a few things.

Duelling VPSes

I've been meaning to upgrade my Linode to a 64-bit instance in order to apply a few pending free upgrades. Except that a friend of mine keeps pointing out that they apparently have some security issues in the privilege escalation sense. I'm not familiar enough with Xen to know one way or the other, but that same friend heartily recommends Digital Ocean. And I'm honestly thinking about it. On the basis that

1. DO offers a smaller grade of instance than Linode at half the price of the next grade up
2. My monthly transfer rate consistently says 3% transfer used, despite the fact that I'm hosting some pretty heavy files
3. That upgrade is going to entail re-building the entire thing regardless of whether I stick or not

Not sure what I'll end up settling on, but I do eventually need to get around to that.

Footnotes

1 - |back| - As soon as their store opens up, I mean. At time of writing, they're down to make sure they can get all their Kickstarter orders filled. I have no idea how long something like that takes.