Now on Debian

This website is now running on a Debian server.

We switched one of our servers to Debian here at work and that caused me to become curious, so I switched this server to it so I could continue to learn about it.

I also got Linux Mint Debian Edition to play nice with VirtualBox guest additions, so I can potentially use a nice desktop version of Debian for my personal use also.

So far, mostly it’s like Ubuntu, but a few more rough edges as far as default functionality. Hopefully though it will make up for those by being more stable and worry free.

Back to Python for web server

For the moment, I’m back to serving this website using the Python SimpleHTTPServer, since it’s installed (in Python) by default. However, it continues to be a bit slow to load pages, which annoys me. I’ll have to look at something to replace that soon.

C++, Python, Haskell

For the moment, I think I’m just going to go ahead and accept these three languages as my default languages to approach problems with. They seem to work with my mind the best in terms of matching the way I think about things and notate problems, and I can construct a reasonable semantic map from Haskell to Python and from Python to C++ in a lot of cases.

Obviously they have various deficiencies when compared to other languages, but all languages seem to have deficiencies. And this groups seems to work pretty well with the way that I think.

My primary annoyances regarding these languages at this time:

• Deploying Python apps seems harder than it should be, and possibly still a pain for an end user.
• None of these languages seem especially favorable to creativity to me, it’s easy for me to feel bored when I think about Python and to some extent Haskell.
• C++ still scares me a bit – I don’t know that I trust myself to create a real application in it that wouldn’t have bugs that could potentially be exploited in dangerous ways.

On a positive side, at least with Python, and maybe Haskell at some point, I’m hopeful that they may get out of my way and me focus on problems better since there is less about the language itself to confuse or entice me.