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: