Posted in haskell on February 27th, 2007 25 Comments »
Someone showed up on #haskell yesterday, asking how to use regular
expressions. This isn’t a completely straightforward question to
answer. While Haskell’s regexp libraries provide the same
functionality you’ll find in Perl, Python, and Java, they provide a
rich and fairly abstract interface that can be daunting to newcomers.
So let’s fix that, and strip away the abstractions [...]
Posted in hardware, software on February 22nd, 2007 18 Comments »
I spent a while this evening reading through the documentation for the
beta release of NVIDIA’s
CUDA GPGPU system. My
motivation for this was that nvcc, the CUDA compiler, is based on a
code drop of the EkoPath
compiler, which I’ve worked on intermittently over the past few years.
The programming
model that these GPUs enforce is incredibly
complex. It’s more [...]
Posted in haskell on February 20th, 2007 1 Comment »
The Haskell community has a very nice implementation-independent
mechanism for building libraries and applications, called
Cabal.
I spent a few hours over the past couple of days hacking on Cabal to
add the ability to build RPM packages. You can fetch my darcs
repository from here:
darcs get –partial http://darcs.serpentine.com/cabal-rpm
This new capability is easy to use. It adds a [...]
Posted in software on February 16th, 2007 3 Comments »
In 1995, I moved from Ireland to the San Francisco Bay Area, because
I’d been offered a job that promised to combine Unix and Scheme
hacking. The prospect tickled me pink.
At Sun Microsystems, the SPARC design team used a home-built tool
called DReAM to manage their ranch of servers as they ran huge batches
of EDA design synthesis, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on February 15th, 2007 1 Comment »
Here’s a wonderful excerpt from a book review written by Daniel Dennett, in which he paraphrases Rapaport on how to argue constructively.
Serious argument depends on mutual respect, and this is often hard to engender when disagreements turn vehement. The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s [...]
