Bitcoin is an exciting new technology invented by the mysterious Satoshi in 2009 which has been gaining some serious traction in the last few months. Although there are many introductory blog posts about Bitcoin there aren’t necessarily many which tackle the subject from a developer’s perspective.

At work we use Clojure as our primary implementation language. I wrote a blog post about the decision which got a lot of attention from the Hacker News community. While we are extremely happy with our decision we have started to deploy some Haskell code on some low memory VPS we deploy.

Some of the machines we deploy are 256M and 512M instances and with multiple instances of the JVM the machines start swapping to disk sooner or later. The other day we needed a simple way to forward all HTTP traffic received by our DNS servers to our website. It seemed like the perfect project to introduce Haskell since the code is independent of everything else and extremely simple; just output a HTTP 301 redirect response no matter what was received on the socket.

The resulting code is as close to a networking skeleton written in Haskell which I hope others will benefit from when starting a Haskell project involving network communication.

One of the problems in the world of moving robots is the task of figuring out where robot is. One way is to mount a GPS-module on the robot. Simpler solutions might include methods that measure how many rounds the wheels have spun and (with the help of the diameter of the wheels and our friend π) calculate the distance travelled. What if the wheel spins or slides? Then the robot “thinks” it’s further along than it actually is.

On our mission to learn Robotics an opportunity presented it self; a line-following competition hosted by IEEE Iceland, November 22nd, 2009. On the teams arrival it was announced that the track was a modeled after the F1 Suzuka track in Japan. We had designed a super slick car racer and implemented a PID controller using an Arduino board. The race was on!