TL;DR Use a buildpack and set "LDFLAGS=--static" --disable-shared I use Heroku to host most of my websites, and since I mostly use PHP for web development this has worked fine. However, every so often I write an app that calls an external program written in, say, C++. Up until now I've had to host these apps on my own web servers. Today I finally bit the bullet and learned how to add a C++ program to a Heroku-hosted site.

Came across Microsoft's announcement of a "A planetary computer for a sustainable future through the power of AI", complete with a glossy video featuring Lucas Joppa @lucasjoppa (see also @Microsoft_Green and #AIforEarth). On the one hand it's great to see super smart people with lots of resources tackling important questions, but it's hard not to escape the feeling that this is the classic technology company approach of framing difficult

One of my pet projects is BioStor, which has been running since 2009 (gulp). BioStor extracts articles from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (details here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-12-187), and currently has over 110,000 articles, all open access. The site itself is showing its age, both in terms of performance and design, so I've wanted to update it for a while now.

Quick note on an experimental version of BioStor that is (mostly) hosted in the cloud. BioStor currently runs on a Mac Mini and uses MySQL as the database. For a number of reasons (it's running on a Mac Mini and my knowledge of optimising MySQL is limited) BioStor is struggling a bit.

Lately I've become more and more interested in moving data off my machine(s) and into the cloud.

CrossRef has been having some issues with it's OpenURL resolver over the weekend, which means that attempts to retrieve metadata from a DOI, or to find a DOI from metadata, have been thwarted. While annoying (see The dangers of the ‘free’ cloud: The Case of CrossRef), in one sense it's reassuring that it's not just biodiversity data providers that are having problems with service availability.