Late night … some progress

I’ve made some progress, I want to write it down here so that I can follow up tomorrow (actually, today):

• Python is not that easy, but it is not that difficult, I’ve decided to use wsgi plus web.py to do my web development, I think wsgi is the right way to go, but web.py is still a question mark – I picked it up just because it is simple
• Tuned Apache configuration to make it support wsgi/web.py, actually I was thinking of finding something else which will be lighter, I still need to do some more research on that but since I’m using wsgi so I don’t think changing web server will affect anything, other than deployment.
• I found a place to host subversion, freely. Using version control can easily track changes, and remote repository will make sure my stuffs are safe. Free service does not guarantee 100% reliability, but thinking of I have local copy already, it’s acceptable

VMWare ESXi and VMWare vSphere

At the first glance VMWare ESXi is the right way to go for VM stuffs, but later on once I found out vSphere is actually not free, I got hit, after I reimaged the Vista box and turned it to a dedicated VM box.

After going through various sources, I decided to stay with ESXi for a while, because:

1. It will be free to me for 60 days (well, another 58 days indeed)
2. Xen is not that easy to be setup as I can see, need to learn more
3. VMWare Go just announced today and I will take a try later on to see how it works

So far, running 6 VMs on a dual-core/3G mem machine is acceptable, I’m going to launch more tests on this box and will remove my VMs on Virtual box soon.

Microsoft stopped offering free domain

Got a mail from MSN saying that they are going to stop offering free domain (registration and hosting) which comes from Windows Live.

It says I need to pay $15 a year to get private registration, hosting, and something else, I guess I don’t want it so just let it be.

Actually I believe Microsoft was wasting money – I register a domain a while back but never used it, at all.

Waiting for GNAT GPL 2009

There are some promising features, the most important one to me is generate Ada specification based on C/C++ header files, this will give me a break on creating my own bindings.

Let’s see – their web site mentioned late May, so it could be just couple of days ahead.

Google App Engine

Boss asked me check out Google’s App Engine, and said that’s cool and could be the direction that we are going to move to, though we may only serve internal customers.

I’m still playing with it – I’m not familiar with Python no Java, and I don’t like them too much, but I can try.

Is grid/cloud the right thing to go? Doubt, but since there are so many experts take it seriously as future, let’s assume it is the direction. It may like “open system”, or “client servr”, or “3-tiers achitect”, or “go web”, or “virtualization” – all these words used to be fancy or cool, but later on they just become our daily life in development.

LogMeIn.com

Got this site from co-worker, pretty good. Now I need to test the speed of connecting from China, and once it works I will install it on my parents’ computer so that I can help checking their computer problems once there is any.

Better than remote desktop or VNC, as it does not need port forwarding nor firewall holes.