Posted in haskell, web on January 31st, 2007 4 Comments »
Even though I wrote my Haskell blog helper tool purely for my own use, I don’t want to store hard-coded strings in it, lest my username and password escape into the wild. This suggests that I need a small config file of some kind. I’m going to walk through the parser I wrote for this [...]
Posted in haskell, web on January 30th, 2007 1 Comment »
Since I started using WordPress to host my blog, I’ve generally been fairly pleased with it. Its killer feature has to be Akismet, the built-in spam filter. Akismet has so far killed over 18,000 spam comments for me, or roughly 300 per day in the two months since I switched from Blosxom to WordPress. Perhaps [...]
Posted in haskell, open source on January 19th, 2007 2 Comments »
During my evening’s Haskell-related Googling, I came across a piece of software called Pancito, written by Andrew Cooke. Pancito is a Haskell package for manipulating images, and Andrew has a beautiful gallery of some of the work he’s done with it. It’s well worth a look. (How did I find Pancito? Because I was playing [...]
Posted in haskell on January 19th, 2007 1 Comment »
For the past number of years, whenever I’ve needed to write a parser for a language, I’ve turned to Terence Parr’s ANTLR. It’s a wonderful piece of software, far more capable than the old standbys lex and yacc. Just as appealing is the fact that it generates recursive-descent parsers that are easy to read and [...]
Posted in haskell on January 19th, 2007 1 Comment »
Rather than bemoan the state of prepackaged Haskell goodness for Fedora, I’ve started down the path of doing something about it. This morning, I put together new packages for Alex, a Haskell lexer, and Happy, a parser generator, and submitted them for consideration via the byzantine Extras review process. If you’re a Haskell hacker and [...]
Posted in reading on January 13th, 2007 No Comments »
From the department of microscopic obsessions of the bourgeoisie: I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker since I first came to the US, over a decade ago. On a mailing list, a correspondent alerts readers to this blog entry, which tickled me pink. Q. Is it true that at some point in the seventies, Goings On [...]
Posted in scm on January 11th, 2007 12 Comments »
I’ve been using darcs recently for some Haskell-related revision control tasks, as it’s the revision control tool of choice for the Haskell community (no surprise; it’s the most widely used Haskell program in existence). However, I can’t say I’ve been all that happy with darcs during my first few days of use. It has some [...]
Posted in haskell, software on January 11th, 2007 9 Comments »
The Hilbert curve is a fractal space-filling curve that is rather pretty to look at. A Hilbert curve of order n traces a single path over a square of side 2^n units, as you can see in the images from MathWorld above (with curves of order 2 through 6). If you pick a point p [...]
Posted in haskell on January 9th, 2007 5 Comments »
As part of my remedial Haskell learning process, I’ve been getting my feet wet once more with monads. Here are a few notes on the techniques that I’ve tried, and how I’ve fared with them. Not surprisingly, my first step was to try reading some tutorials. If you’ve looked, you may have noticed that the [...]
Posted in haskell, linux on January 5th, 2007 1 Comment »
Since I’ve been away from the Haskell world for a long time, it’s been interesting to return and observe some surprises about the practical side of working with the language. For me, an early gotcha has been the relative paucity of information on how to obtain and install third-party software packages. So here’s my little [...]
