Most recently, I’ve been working on this:

Essentially, contestants build an AI to battle it out in an FPS-esque arena. It was really quite interesting, although it required serious time input.

For more info, look here. My team really only had one good pre-submission, but our final product should be competitive.

If you’re interested in participating in AI battling tournaments, you might want to check out the newly created ACM Queue Challenge.

Flexibility

As mentioned, Linode lets you do anything. Currently, I use my server to host subversion, tomcat, apache, MySQL, postfix email, and random files. But surely, you say, the hardware must be oversold, or you’re restricted in some crippling manner? Well, not really. I come nowhere close to my guaranteed bandwidth, CPU, or memory allotment with the smallest package available:

Linode 360:

• 360MB RAM
• 16GB Disk Storage
• 200GB/mo transfer
• $19.99/mo

The only perceivable downside to this flexibility…is the flexibility. When you create a server, you start with a flat, uninteresting linux distribution. You must manually install apache, tomcat, subversion, and whatever other services you wish to run. This configuration, however, lets you fine-tune the system to your exact specifications, and it lets you learn how to do all that in the process. With SSH at your side, you too can become a Linux ninja and master the lore of old. You’ll probably wind up a more efficient developer, and at the very least you’ll learn a neat Unix command or two.

Price

$19.99/mo for a web server seems pricey, but it really isn’t. You’re buying power, guaranteed reliability, and ownership of your server. By Linode’s own FAQ, hardware resources are guaranteed, and when the system is able, bursts of usage beyond are allowed. With a general web host, you’re stuck to whatever you’re given. The only other competition in this arena, really, is Slicehost. Their base $20/mo package only includes 256MB of RAM, however, which is simply unacceptable when a 384 solution exists for the same price.

Reliability

In the 5 months I’ve owned my Linode account, my server has only gone down once, for a 1-hour period. I was rather upset at the outage, as I use my server nightly, but I was not riled enough to seek a $0.66 refund. Performance, too, has always been top-notch. Not once have I ever noticed latency, which is simply incredible compared to general web hosts.

Conclusion

Linode is amazing, and if you believe me, click the referral link I hid in the first word of this post. If you stay on 3 months with my referral code, I get a month free.

Cheers.

As per the website title, I’m challenging myself to learn one new technology a month. Less time for a programming language, framework, or concept [a "prog"] would give only cursory knowledge, but I hope to hit that sweet spot by which I could name a prog as the right tool for a problem and not restrict myself to only currently known progs.

So, what do do from here, you ask? Learn jQuery. I’ve always been opposed to the web as platform, mostly due to IE6, but flex has convinced me that there is a light, and jQuery seems to be another beacon in the treatorous sea that is supporting internet explorer. Granted, I now believe IE8 to be a valid browser contender and a solid improvement to both IE and web browsers as a whole, but IE6 continues to infest the waters of the web, and developers are forced to hack their way through the dragons and krakens.

Ranting aside, jQuery appears to offer a number of handy selectors and event handling mechanisms that make developing for IE less-painful than before. Someone else abstracted away the nonsense, and we as developers profit.

Onward, to jQuery!