I'd like to set up some kind of secure communication link between this server (or one like it) and my browser. For various (good, interesting) reasons, my hosting provider doesn't provide SSL for member sites, so SSL isn't an option. Does anyone else have this problem? I imagine there must be others who can't or won't use SSL, but still want secure communication. I've already started working on a JavaScript & Haskell solution in my head, but I wanted to see if anyone else has already solved the problem before I go too much farther.

FreeMind is a simple, elegant productivity tool - it basically allows you to quickly generate a "mind map" document. This is essentially a pleasantly laid out tree structure that packs a lot of information into a little bit of space. You can decorate the nodes with icons that have meaning for you, and also add a hyperlink to the node. Keyboard shortcuts are excellent, and clearly these folks went to a lot of trouble to keep the tool simple and easy to use. Really pleasant to work with. I'm starting to organize my task lists and so on with it, and that's going well.

PowerShell
is Microsoft's replacement for the well-worn command prompt. It's pretty slick - definitely puts Windows on par with Unix in terms of shells. Unlike command.com or cmd.exe, it's an actual programming language - with first-class functions, no less. It's got all the usual functional programming language friends - though the names have all been changed ("map" is spelled "foreach-object", "filter" is spelled "where"). What distinguishes it from other scripting languages is the amount of effort that's been put into making Windows features easily available. PowerShell makes it easy to access .Net, COM, WMI, the registry, you name it. Examples:

Just noticed that the permalinks from the old site weren't being redirected properly, should be fixed now. Stylesheets don't seem to work, but the content is there.

I just wrote a little blurb about the Performancing add-on for Firefox. It's a little add-on that allows you to post to your blog using a rich text editor, spell checker, etc. Seemed kind of handy. Unfortunately, it chose to add a little "powered by performancing" line to the end of my post. Not appreciated, so I've uninstalled that one. What posting tools do you use?

I've been meaning to do this for a long time now, glad to see I'm not the only crazy one. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript/Programmers_guide

After a long hiatus, I'm starting my blog again. I've change to a new hosting service that's very flexible and very reasonably priced - NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. So far I'm very happy with them. I've also decided that it's better to have a working blog than to work on blogging software, so I've settled on one that's fairly standard and easy to set up. I'll be writing more in the next few days as I get the domain transfer worked out and so on.