Month: July 2005

Dreamhost Awesomeness

I’ve been with Dreamhost for almost five years now and the service has been continualy improving the entire time. Up to their usual trick, they’ve gone and done a few new things this week. The first big on is installing the new version of Ruby and Ruby on Rails for everyone. That’s gotta make the Rails people happy. It also means I can start playing and don’t have to spend time installing.

The second thing I found was a Gmail-esque announcement in my admin panel:

This is a big one. Starting today, we’re the only web host in the world
(as far as we know, and we didn’t check) that automatically GROWS every
shared customer’s disk and bandwidth quotas every week!

That’s right, every week from now on your quotas will be increased by
this much per active shared hosting plan:

  • L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
  • L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
  • L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
  • L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!

Now, that’s a pretty solid announcement — it raises the bar for other hosts and means lots of space for me to play with. They also found the time to update to PHP 5 and MYSQL 4.1. And add CPU usage tracking.

London Bombing

Al-qaeda has once-again proven that they are a force to be reckoned with by testing their mettle against tin-cans full of people. Bombs were detonated on the Underground and a bus earlier today in London, with the terrorist network claiming responsibility.

A spokesman for Al-queda put the attacks into perspective for western viewers:

Fighting trained soldiers was starting to get a little ‘old-hat’, you know? We had heard whisperings of the great mechanical dragons and their riches living beneath the Misty City. The stories of sneaking weapons into such a tightly guarded and private sanctuary will live on forever.

Anyway, weblogs seem to be the way that people are getting information. They can usually be trusted:

Bombing mass-transit is absolutely despicable. You see photos roll in from Jerusalem, Tokyo, Baghdad and Madrid and you have to wonder what people are thinking when they do these things. They’re only hurting people like themselves.

God’s Little Toys

God’s Little Toys
William Gibson essay about the tools – “Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating”.

Sudoku Primer

Sudoku
People seem to be searching for information related to the puzzle game called Sodoku, so here we go. The game (officially known as Sudoku) was first popularised by Japan in 1986, but in the past few months it’s been appearing in many newspapers around the globe. The Sodoku surge is primarily the responsibility of Wayne Gould, who wrote a computer program that allows for the easy creation of puzzle boards.

The puzzle itself is relatively simple; the common format consists of a 9×9 grid, that’s further sub-divided into nine 3×3 grids. The object is to fill each column, row and 3×3 grid with the numbers one through nine (other characters or symbols can be used) without any repeats. The game’s difficulty lies in the initial board configuration — both the quantity and frequency of the given numbers. True Sodoku puzzles have only one unique solution per puzzle.

Further Links & Reading:

That’s about it for now. The next thing up will be cryptic crosswords — I’ve been figuring out how to do them over the last week or two. Alanah, Will and I managed to finish off the Globe’s Canada Day cryptic puzzle (it was a little on the intense side of things).

Updates: