dimator | head

I finally made the switch to Ubuntu on my server machine. It was running debian before, and I don’t know whose fault it was, but over the years, upgrading packages became more and more impossible. apt would routinely fail, to the point where I said screw it. I’ve heard that Ubuntu’s package managers (as in, humans) are much more careful about package rot.

Smashed a great uptime in the process (although not my record):


$ cat UPTIME
20:48:49 up 342 days, 22:37, 1 user, load average: 6.00, 6.05, 6.05


Erlang seems totally sweet. The biggest “wow” I got was from its concurrency features, which are built-in and stupid easy. Code is also hot-swappable. Hot swappable! Supposedly, Erlang is used by all kinds of heavyweight telco bigwigs, including Ericsson, where it is developed. Here is the getting started guide.

Even sweeter, here is an article about a real-world application, OpenPoker, a MMO poker game written in Erlang. Highly cool, although I couldn’t find the tarball to poke at anywhere.