I grew up on science fiction. I loved reading stories of The Future, where space travel was commonplace, where all energy was generated cleanly, and where we worked side-by-side with machine intelligences to accomplish tasks. Of course, that wasn’t what most of the books were about; space travel, clean energy, and A.I. were just part…
Random thoughts
It’s always DNS
I host a few websites for myself and family on DigitalOcean. Up until recently, I’ve always just spun up a new droplet for each site, so they were all fully independent from each other; this was the easiest and most convenient way to get a new site up and running without jeopardizing uptime on other…
New Host!
I’ve finally moved to a VPS on DigitalOcean, from my previous (free) shared hosting. I did this for a couple of reasons: first, while my hosting was free for a year with my domain name, that year was almost up. To renew my hosting for the second+ year, I would have needed to pay $38.88/year;…
Clinton’s Email Server
Ars Technica did a nice job of creating an impartial write-up on why Hillary Clinton used an external email server, and how it was actually used. It sounds to me like there’s an institutional history of using private email to conduct business, largely due to obstructive or incompetent IT services (in fairness to the State…
Email server admins are underappreciated
Today I reconfigured a server I maintain for the Office of Residential Life and Housing. It broke yesterday because of a database issue, but I’ve taken this as an opportunity to rebuild and improve it with an included email server. I have it mostly up and running now, but it’s been a long, slow process that…
Of MOOCs and Learning
Decades ago, dreamers imagined a world where the resources and tools for learning anything could be used by anyone. Where colleges, universities, and even ordinary people could share information and ideas, collaborate and learn. With the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, many people thought that that world was close at hand, but…