Mac OS X to Linux Video Chat
Since he's on Linux and uses vim as his primary editor, a simple setup with the unix utility 'screen', ssh and vim did the trick as far as working together on the code (I'm more of a TextMater, but have enough experience with vim, that changing editor is not much of a problem for me).
Figuring out the best way to communicate while programming was a bit more tricky, since we aimed for getting both video and audio. Skype works well for audio, but didn't seem to have video for Linux. We spent quite a bit trying to get Ekiga and XMeeting to talk together, but we never managed to get the video+audio signal to come through.
In the end we tried out WengoPhone, and this solved our problems. Didn't take any fiddling with setup or configuration, worked right out of the box, and both audio and video quality seems fine. So if you're having problem getting video chat to work between Mac and Linux, try out Wengo!
Ruby, Haskell and Euler
But lately I've been dabbling quite a bit with the pure function language Haskell, and after finishing some twenty challenges, I decided to start putting Haskell to the test. I started redoing each challenge in Haskell, and the result was quite interesting.
In general the Haskell solutions were just as readable and just as expressive (the line counts for the Ruby and Haskell solution was more or less identical). Haskell tends, of course, to really show its strengths in these kind of math-oriented problem areas, but I was still surprised to see a statically typed and compiled language so easily reach the same level of expressiveness as Ruby. And as a bonus, the Haskell solutions were an order of magnitude faster than the equivalent Ruby programs for the more demanding problems.
Naturally I am not about to jump from Ruby to Haskell for my daily web-programming tasks, but as I get more and more familiar with Haskell I am also getting more and more convinced, that some day knowing it might come in really handy.
Email works again
It took a while before I noticed it, but apparently info@mathias-biilmann.net has been out of order for quite some time.
The problems was related to the DNS changes nessesary to host my blog on the Webpop platform, and some server-changes on Dreamhosts site (where my blog used to live).
I ended up switching to Google Apps, and got a pleasant surprise. Dreamhost offers a special feature, where you can use addresses like info+some_stuff@mathias-biilmann.net when signing up for various services. Then any spam mail that might end up comming your way as a result of the signup, can be easily identified and tagged.
I thought that I would loose that feature with the switch - but suddenly the newsletter from Shoppify showed up at one of these addresses - right in my gmail inbox! I made some tests, and it seems like gmail indeed has the same feature, although it only seems to work for Google Apps, and not for regular gmail accounts...
When Bad Spelling Gets Standardized
While studying the configuration options of the proxy cache Squid, I stumbled over this gem of a comment:
# Squid will write the Referer field from HTTP requests to the
# filename specified here. By default referer_log is disabled.
# Note that "referer" is actually a misspelling of "referrer"
# however the misspelt version has been accepted into the HTTP RFCs
# and we accept both.
Biilmann Blog on Webpop
Just recreated my Blog with the Webpop design framework in about 15 minutes.
While there's still quite a bit of work to do before we launch our framework (otherwise we would launch it today!), the platform is already a joy to work with.
It's an entirely different experience than working with something like Dreamweaver or any of the wizards for web-site creation. The Webpop design framework is a tool for web designers with a solid knowledge of css and web standards - not a "one click and you have a generic looking homepage" publisher.
