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wget -O- https://example.org/install.sh | sh

is a very common installation method presented by various tools (or via curl). In most cases you even need to run them as root due to the fact that the creators of those tools do not understand how to have their software work as non-root users.

For example:
https://toolbelt.heroku.com/de...
https://docs.docker.com/linux/...
https://nodejs.org/en/download...

They want you moving towards a PaaS type infrastructure. https://www.openshift.com/ https://www.heroku.com/ http://www.activestate.com/sta... ... So yes an entirely new stack but one that is already well tested and in use. The entire concept of how you do internal tooling should be changing.

If you are nervous about costs and overhead time required, you can try out some small apps on a PaaS site such as Heroku https://www.heroku.com/ Then graduate to doing it on Amazon or whatever, once you figure out what you need or don't need, or don't want to be bothered with.

Learn Go. It's clean, beautiful, and feels to me today like Python felt ten years ago. It's a very young language, and doesn't have the rich set of libraries you'll get with a more mature language. But community support is great, and more importantly, programming in Go is fun. If you're writing web stuff, host it on Heroku and stop worrying about system administration. Make your app 12-Factor compliant, and worry somewhat less about scaling. Play with Neo4j or other graph databases, and start to see the graphs all around you. (But note, there is no working, complete Go library for Neo4j - life can be rough at the edge.)

Most importantly, write what you find fun to write. :)

http://pmretract.heroku.com/byyear

Seems like despite the small percentage (say, like CO2 ppm in the atmosphere), the trend is alarming.

Some links:
Cloud IDE
Online Java Debug Video
Cloud Bees
Cloud Foundry
OpenShift
Heroku

Sadly, his post will be missed because everyone's too busy talking about how everything can be done just as easily on a $500,000 server farm running Oracle's latest and greatest turd.

Actually, I was going to talk about how PostgreSQL 9.2 (expected in Q3 of this year) will include JSON support. The database also has non-relational key value storage, and that feature is even available in Heroku deployments now.

PostgreSQL also lets you relax ACID for performance when that makes sense, at the transaction level, using synchronous_commit parameter and unlogged tables.

There are two things PostgreSQL doesn't do as well as MongoDB. It won't do simple key/value lookups quite as fast; I normally eliminate that problem by putting a memcached server in at some level. And you can't split writes among multiple nodes easily yet.

The Daily Mail Helps Prevent Cancer, New Studies Show

"For years, research has shown that the Daily Mail is beneficial in preventing heart attacks. Now new studies support its ability to prevent cancer as well. The studies, involving dozens of unaware readers over many decades, show reductions of cancer incidence (both short- and long-term) and mortality rate as well as a decrease in metastatic cancer. It still is not known exactly how the Daily Mail and cancer are connected, but those between the ages of 55-60 will now likely consider taking low-dose Daily Mail daily for the remainder of their lives, perhaps just the Sport section."

Write the WinMain (though it is real ugly), then initialize OpenGL for him

You can do the same with Javascript.

http://glsl.heroku.com/
http://games.greggman.com/game/html5-bytebeat/
http://jsfiddle.net/

Surely there are more such thingies, which make it *very* easy to get something moving on the screen. Why bother with anything less, especially with what you proposed, unless you absolutely fucking hate the kid? Not saying you don't have a point -- I started to learn programming by modifying existing stuff, NOT by learning it from scratch. But I totally disagree that Javascript and HTML have to be lame. That's just a clueless statement.

Have a look at this presentation ... Scala is very terse and expressive (= good, fun for programmers) and interoperates well with Java (= good for the boss and the business). It is modern, well-designed and has an active community.

The Daily Fail? You're posting a link to the Daily Fail?

Watch out, that could cause cancer.

http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/

You know, I first got started programming when I happened upon a left hand basic cartridge with an Atari 400 for $5 at a garage sale. It came with an attachable floppy disk drive that was DOA. Countless hours would be spent with a small black and white TV with me writing procedures. Should the power turn off, all that work was lost.

Despite growing up below the poverty line working on farms, I was able to go to college with enough grants based on need. This is where our paths diverge ... and I would not automatically assume that my four year degree at the University of Minnesota would make me a better programmer than yourself or anyone who taught themselves to code. But the important point of this is that when I interview (and I've held interviews for programmers to come onto my team many times) the interviewer is looking for you to prove that you will be a self motivated asset to the team. If you can put MIT or some prestigious school, they often lower their required threshold of proof. If you put U of MN there is still proof required -- after all there are some ~50k students at the U of MN and as such it would be entirely possible for some idiot to be herded through with the other cattle. So they just need to make sure I am not this idiot -- or at least not in the area they need me for. Now, when you have institution to back up your claim of skills, the proof requirement quickly becomes insurmountable.

So I will issue you a challenge and I will target the Ruby language and Rails framework. This probably isn't the best option for a job seeker (I think some Java with maybe Spring Framework would be better suited for a position) but this could result in proof. If you want reading material for any of these steps, I recommend the Pragmatic Programmer series on Ruby and Ruby on Rails (used it is quite cheap but here is a free alternative).

Step One: Learn Ruby. Ruby is a functional language that is very simple and easy to learn but difficult to completely master. The flexibility of the language seems to continually leave me with more and more options at my disposal. From mixins to domain specific languages, it just keeps on giving. I'm guessing with your background you're going to notice that some things in Ruby are slow. This is okay. As computers have gotten beefier, programmers have sacrificed performance and (to a large degree) memory in order to make code easier to maintain and write.

Step Two: Learn Rails. Rails is a very extensive framework that is again easy to learn. That tutorial should show you how to master concepts like quickly creating a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application for a blog or recipes (I forget). From here you have to use your imagination. Make something that is CRUD or some mutation of CRUD to demonstrate that you know how to utilize and extend this concept. You might use census data and experiment with new UI toys like Processing or HTML5's Canvas element. I think if you have access to some mildly interesting data that building a site you'd like to share would be a great idea (even if it is just in CRUD format). But get it to a state where you're proud of it.

Step Three: Github. Put your source on Github.

Step Four: Host your project on Heroku. You might buy a domain name if you're open to $12/year. I don't know how far you want to take this part. But get it so that people can access it.

Now once you've iterated over that a bunch

Better, actually, is this one:
http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/

You can do something similar with Amazon Web Services and/or Eucalyptus [eucalyptus.com].

No you can't. This is a layer of the stack above AWS or Eucalyptus. In fact those are two of the target platforms for this.

Those two give you an API for creating and destroying Virtual Machine instances. This leverages that ability to provide a scalable deployment stack for your applications. If you want to understand what it's about watch the videos on the site. Alternatively, have a look at http://heroku.com./ It's the same as that but it supports more languages/frameworks and it's open-source.

Hotwire, an innovative shell
http://code.google.com/p/hotwire-shell/
Click here to install on Debian/friends

PowerShell clone on Linux (warning: uses Mono)
http://pash.sourceforge.net/

Ruby-based shell:
http://rush.heroku.com/

Well, the Mail is well known for its medical recommendations...

http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/about

Check out the actual numbers - it's rather interesting. Eurogamer's 2009 ratings end with an average score of 6.8 over 405 reviews - the mode is 8 (113 reviews) followed closely by 7 (105). There were 88 games rated as under 5 and 43 as over 9. The site is quite fun to play around with, especially when comparing writers.

LOL. Congratulations, you just made every British person still reading this topic laugh. Not being British, I doubt you understand why. The Daily Mail! The Daily Mail is a tabloid newspaper that sells by making scary shit up for ridiculous headlines, and backing this up with manipulated statistics or paid off "experts". Would any American take you seriously if you brought The National Enquirer as a source into a debate? No! You'd be laughed out of the room. This is akin to what you've just done.

For the last several years, the Daily Mail has been engaged in the heroic pursuit of classifying things that cure and cause cancer. Some things do both. Since you're apparently a fan, maybe you can help them.

It is quite obvious at this point that not only are you terrible at picking your sources, but that you also know nothing at all about the UK on which to pick any good source. I won't deny that the UK has problems in its inner cities, but they are not at all caused by a lack of guns for people to defend themselves. By any real measure of crime, the US falls behind the UK. The US has a higher homicide rate, higher rape rate, higher murder rate, lower World Peace Index ranking. If you think these things are an acceptable trade off for being 1.4 times more likely to come home with your wallet still in your pocket, that's your prerogative - though one I doubt that most sane people would share.

Luckily, someone has condensed the opinions of that most reliable of sources, the Daily Mail, into a handy list!

Also, if Ruby's your bag - Heroku is kind of like App Engine, for Rubyists.

Yes, it's buzzworthy, but once you get the hang of Heroku for Ruby code, you'll never want to futz with root access on a server again.

On Heroku, you can get a Sinatra or Rails app *running in minutes* to test it out, and your code will work just fine on any VPS if you decide you don't like Heroku. You push code to the platform with Git, they store it in the cloud, and run it behind a fully managed webserver with a HTTP cache, a Postgres database, Memcache, and more goodies. The idea is to let the experts manage the iron and the cutting-edge and best practice services, so you can focus on your product and code. Also, it's free to use for simple apps, and offers really good granularity in pricing so you only pay for what you use.

Similarly, there's Google App Engine for Python. It's a great product but not as compelling to play around with since you need to learn new tricks since it's not a conventional POSIX stack, only uses BigTable for a database, etc. Basically the more of GAE you use, the less ability to run your code elsewhere in the future.

Also, dtdobson is used by an innovative 3rd party, poke API app:
check it out: http://poketim.heroku.com/

An instant after I had written this I regretted doing so, because I suddenly remembered the old wise words of Why the lucky stiff... Teaching programming should be easy, fun, in collaboration with other kids, done on the child's terms and not be about how a computer works. I wholeheartedly hope you teach the kid ruby with hackety hack. Because it's all of the above and done in a language the is all about readability and doesn't have the "first you have to do like this and then that" that many other languages have. Take C or Java, you'll either have to wade through a lot information or you have to just leave a blank at many questions like: "why do I have to write include stdio?", "what is this int main()?", "why do I have to write public?", "what is an int?" or even "what is a compiler?" or "what is a textfile?" In ruby you might jump those initial questions in a couple of sentences for instances like this: "I'm going to teach you many different ways of hacking, but we are going to start here with this program called irb, and do the first steps. Now in this program type puts "hello world", which puts "hello world" on the screen..."

I'm maintaining _why's Hackety Hack, which was built specifically for this purpose. It's still in "not quite 100% ready yet" mode, but you can at least keep your eyes peeled. I'm also quite open to thoughts and suggestions. http://hackety-hack.heroku.com/ http://github.com/steveklabnik/hacketyhack

Shoes (a Ruby environment) is a great concept. If only the great why hadn't left it behind in its current messy state. Here's a short article about Shoes and two more programming environments for kids.

Captcha: kinder

Why the Lucky Stiff created an online Ruby environment for teaching programmign to kids. It's called Hackety Hack. Here's a link:
http://hacketyhack.heroku.com/

> It's strange to me that most ISPs/hosting
> companies still don't offer Postgres.

Heroku offers Rails application hosting on PostgreSQL only. 38K apps and growing... their setup is very slick.

Then again, I'm a big fan of Rails on PostgreSQL.

The link for Heroku is broken, it points to http://slashdot.org/heroku.com.
Here is a working link:
http://heroku.com/

A truly distributed cloud is an interesting concept, but difficult in practice. First, in order to keep the data safe, it would have to be encrypted. But that means that it's difficult (probably impossible) for the local computer to actually interact with the data. You might be able to do some sort of web of trust thing that allows semi-trusted clients access to the data they need to do calculations, but it looks really hard to me.

Next, in order to ensure that the data is always available, you need to make sure it's backed up several different places. Which means tracking which versions of which files are on which nodes, and keeping everything in sync, which leads to more traffic and resource usage.

Then there's the problem of fairness. The number of people who want to use the cloud will generally swamp the number of people who want to let the cloud use them. You could try something akin to BitTorrent, where they have a tit-for-tat protocol to ensure nobody hogs. But that's prone to error and abuse.

Distributed storage has been done, but this is way harder.

It seems like a more likely path to Ultimate Victory is to engineer an open source cloud where anybody with $20K worth of hardware can easily set up their own micro-cloud, to provide some niche service to a few dozen or few hundred clients. You might have entire companies using that software to run an offsite backup service, scalable web app hosting, or hosting third-party, niche MMORPGs. If your company is entirely devoted to doing one thing -- like deploying Rails apps a la Heroku, it's hard to imagine Amazon would muscle into your territory any time soon.

Not going to look into this in too much depth yet, but it sounds quite a lot like Heroku -- only less beginner-oriented, and without trying to do server-side javascript.

1. Rush, a ruby shell. Rush strikes me as a very cool project. This slideshow is a good introduction.
2. iPython with the "sh" profile. About halfway into this article they discuss it.
3. Hotwire, an "object-oriented hypershell"