After having had enough of slow hosting, I decided to fork out for a second batch of the stuff, this time based in the States. Ping-wise it's not fantastic, not far shy of 250ms latency between myself and the new host. However, the amount of stuff I get lobbed in there for free is nothing short of insane.

Unlimited bandwidth, free MSSQL and MySQL hosting (to the tune of 2 gig each), ASP.NET 1.1 and beta 2.0, PHP, a nice control panel, 2 gig of web space...

Migrating my current site to the new hosting is going to take a while though. When you've used the same space for a dozen different things over the years, you accumulate what us technical types like to call 'a bunch of crap'. At the minute, pablissimo.com should point to the new hosting (your DNS mileage may vary, it's still propagating), with the intention of bringing pablissimo.net over in the next few days.

The reasoning went a shade further than mere speed; I needed things like MSSQL and ASP.NET for Tornado, my (ever so slowly coming along) portal project. I'll host a live development version on the new space, probably at somewhere like http://tornado.pablissimo.com, along with a documentation wiki and development blog for those interested. How I'll fit any of this in between paid work and my dissertation is yet to be determined.

My dissertation's actually pretty interesting. It's on multi-agent systems, and involves how agents in a system can choose to reward each other for their participation on a task. It's surprising just how much Reinforcement Learning techniques can accomplish, and to those with any interest in agent-based systems, machine learning and so on I wholly recommend the excellent Reinforcement Learning by Sutton and Barto. Since Q-Learning and eligibility traces will be the basis of my project, I'm certainly glad of having it around.