I was just renewing a domain at Easily.co.uk (a large UK registrar) and after the process followed a link to the “Top 10 sites at Easily”. Number 3 was a site cattleprods.co.uk, which seemed a little bit odd unless the British have got a taste for animal (or crowd) control. You can discover the site for yourself, but from a technical standpoint, it’s an excellent use of Flash and from a personal point of view, I’ve just wasted an hour there…

First session today was called “Is FP for me” and covered the areas in which functional programming might be useful. The session was given by Hubert Matthews and gave an excellent overview of when and where to use a functional programming language. He started by discussing the different types of language, using as examples Fortran (for mathematical calculation), COBOL (for business applications) and Lisp (for more algorithmic and abstract programming). Although all three languages were created in the 1950s, they are still with us today, COBOL having inspired the creation of imperative languages such as C/C++ and Smalltalk, Lisp providing ideas which have developed into Haskell, OCaml and similar. When asked which language would give a neophyte a good introduction into the techniques, Hubert suggested Haskell.

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Interesting session this morning, from Schalke Cronje, on RPM package management. One of those sessions that cover a subject I know something about but have never had time to look at in depth. Schalke covered the basic command line usage of RPM and then showed us how to create spec files and build packages that could be distributed over multiple platforms. Nothing stunningly new, but all explained clearly and it will certainly give me the confidence to try packaging up some of my stuff with a few more deployment features.

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One of the tracks at this conference has been on functional programming and today’s sessions covered FP in general and more specifically, Erlang and Haskell. Every conference has a special track, in the past there has been template programming in C++, C# and .Net programming, or open source software. The special tracks often are on subjects which are not mainstream at present. But if they are well attended, it’s usually an indication that they may be in the next couple of years. And the FP sessions were very well attended (I spent a couple sitting on the floor) so expect to see more of these languages in the future.

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So it’s April, I’m in Oxford… it must be the ACCU conference again. This is a leading conference for programmers in the UK and Europe and brings some of the brightest and best in one place for four days of talks, meetings and after-hours wining and dining. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometime back I wrote about comment spam in the blogs and using fake comment pages in order to catch automated spambots and record their IPs. Over the months I clocked up a few thousand spambots and I thought it might be fun to do something with them. Like block them for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

After recently transferring a bunch of mailing lists from Majordomo to Mailman, one of the features that was missed by the users was the ‘–LongSig’ feature of Majordomo. Very useful, but not available in Mailman. Using the ‘–LongSig’ tag in an email meant that anything after that was removed by Mailman and this especially useful if you work in a company that insists on putting 20 lines of boilerplate disclaimers at the end of every email sent. On a mailing list, this can annoy people. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually cover software releases on the blog, but some software is so good and well made that when it reaches a final release stage I can’t help shouting YaHoo and cracking a bottle of champers! Timo Sirainen has been working on Dovecot for nearly five years and has taken a perfectionist attitude towards the way it works. He’s spent the last six months refusing to release a final version and we’ve all watched as the release candidate numbering has crept up to hit rc23. A couple of weeks ago he chose Friday 13th to do the final release, and it has happened. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few months my old workhorse desktop computer started to play up and it was clear that it would soon be time to replace it. Or parts of it rather… mainly the graphics card and possibly the mobo. I started looking around for a new barebones setup and decided that I’d go for a Shuttle of some type or another. I ended up with a Shuttle SN25P and here are some PoV on the system as a whole and installing SuSE 10.2 on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who runs a blog knows about blog spam (or comment spam). Here on this site I run SpamKarma 2 which keeps out 99% of the spam and puts the other 1% in moderation for me to check. But when the number of spam comments reaches into the hundreds per day, then it starts to skew the logs too much. Flattering though it is at first glance to see hundreds of eager visitors each day, closer inspection shows many of them to be comment spammers. So, I started to look at ways to stop them before they got to leave a comment in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »