Saturday, March 29, 2014

Quick Thoughts about Digital Ocean

I recently started playing with DO Droplets. From 0.7 cents per hour, the cost of experimenting is very low. The total time from creation to up and running a website, for me, without extensive prescripted deployment recipes, is under two hours, and seems to be a manageable cost at $5. This is very favorably priced compared to shared hosting, and the KVM vps seems to handle memory more adequately than my vz vps. SBCL always segfaults during build process on a VPS with more ram on the VZ side, and correctly built on the 512MB DO system. I find that needing to destroy the container when done to release the resources is not too bad, I could imagine spinning up a test container on the fly (60 seconds to do this) and releasing it after finishing. I also found that the same hostname yielded the same IP address a second time, a week later. I don't know that I should count on this, but it certainly saved a little trouble fiddling with DNS.

eshell and tty numbers

This may seem obvious after reading more, but it surprised me a little that emacs eshell mode does not reserve a persistent tty number, and grabs one on the fly for any command run. If I have a terminal window open, using tty 0, and run the tty command in eshell, it may tell me tty 2, but after closing the terminal, running tty in eshell now gives tty 0. This is not the case with real shells, or even with the shell mode in emacs, where the shell has a persistent controlling terminal.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

PythonAnywhere

Interestingly, pythonanywhere.com has access to a bash console, and emacs-23 installed. So it's also almost like emacs-lisp anywhere, though I haven't experimented much with the server side and it appears the firewall prevents using things like erc (irc client) from within the web interface. I think the console is quite usuble, and the 100s per day is actually not bad for a free plan.

It took not very long to launch web2py at djuber.pythonanywhere.com, and if I can use this for prototyping in django or web2py, I may pay for the larger plan.