distributed

so my year long project involves doing some pretty nasty stuff with Erlang. I am just starting to get to grips with it. I have very limited knowledge of networking and need to ask how/why something doesn't work. I followed the code from this guide, http://20bits.com/article/network-programming-in-erlang , that provides Erlang code for a server to echo back text that is fed into it The instructions to run it is to start the erlang code, he reccomends port 8888, and then telnet to the localhost and voila, access to the echo server My question is, would it be easy for me to run this server on my

Currently I run a web app that heavily relies on short URLs that link to the original content, these URLs need to be as short as possible. At the moment, I use a simple MySQL data store for storing these objects and an incrementing counter -> base 62 conversion to generate short urls that will grow over time. We need to move to a more distributed and scalable environment. What is the best way of generating small, unique short Urls for content in a distributed data store? To be specific we plan to use either Mongo or DynamoDB . Chris Shain I'd suggest you have a look at Jon Skeet's description