Hello, is this thing on?

Nick Sieger — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 04:00:20 +0000

Hello there, gentle reader! Thanks for stopping by and helping me re-establish my own corner of the web.

My name is Nick. I’m a hacker originally from and currently located in Minneapolis, MN. I experimented with blogging for a while at my Radio weblog, Klactoveesedstene and finally decided that I need to reset and try this thing again.

My current interests are fairly broad, but to list a few specific examples:

Ruby and dynamic languages
Language design, domain-specific languages, and expressiveness in programming
Less code and DRY
Javascript as a serious programming language, AJAX, Rails, Greasemonkey
SCM, continuous integration, build tools (maven2, rake)
Testing methodologies: developer testing, TDD, BDD, web testing (watir), FIT
and (the famous) much much more…

A bit about the setup here. First, a plug for the folks at Rimuhosting – I’ve got a VPS with Rimu. They set it up for me within about an hour of placing an order (on a Saturday, no less!), and I was off and running. I chose Ubuntu Breezy for my distro, and it came spanking clean – extremely minimal, so that I can practice additive rather than subtractive security on my server and install only what I need. I contemplated going with shared hosting for a little while but given that I like to tinker with stuff I’m really glad I chose a setup with root access.

First order of business when setting up the server is to get Subversion, Trac, and ruby. Building my own Ruby 1.8.4 proved a bit of an extra challenge since things you’d think were pretty essential in a distro like openssl, gdbm and zlib were actually missing, but they were easily apt-gettable. By the end of the weekend I had purchased domains from Go Daddy, assigned the DNS entries in Rimu’s control panel, had Apache2 up and running with my very own svn, trac and typo instances running. Very slick!

And now in the words of Guy Kawasaki, I hope to use the word “I” a lot less if possible on this blog. Back to your regularly scheduled hacking…

Nick Sieger: Hello, is this thing on?

Hello, is this thing on?