To wit, a few judiciously curated sources of visual edification:

for great justice

unhappy hipsters

riot right click

Keynote: Real world Haskell. from Malcolm Wallace on Vimeo.

Here is a list of people I know about who tweet about FP on a semi-regular basis, along with what I think are their main interests. If you want to see the list extended or modified, let me know.

Bryan O’Sullivan (bos31337) – Haskell
Chris Smith (aChrisSmith) – F#
Alex Payne (al3x) – Scala
Brandon Allberry (allberry_b) – Haskell
alpheccar – Haskell
Andre Pang (andrepang) – Erlang
Arnar Birgisson (arnarbi) – Haskell
Brad Anderson (boorad) – Erlang
Chris Eidhof (chriseidhof) – Haskell
Conal Elliott (conal) – Haskell
Conrad Parker (conradparker) – Haskell
Dean Wampler (deanwampler) – Scala
Don Stewart (donsbot) – Haskell
Dave Pollak (dpp) – Scala
David MacIver (DRMacIver) – Scala
Eelco Lempsink (eeclo) – Haskell
Bob Ippolito (etrepum) – Erlang
Galois, Inc. (galoisinc) – Haskell
Jake McArthur (geezusfreeek) – Haskell
Pepe Iborra (hate_pick_pick) – Haskell
John Goerzen (jgoerzen) – Haskell
John Kalucki (jkalucki) – Scala
Eugene Kirpichov (jkff) – Haskell
Jorge Ortiz (jorgeortiz85) – Scala
Joseph Holsten (josephholsten) – FP
Justin Sheehy (justinsheehy) – Erlang
Kazuya Sakakihara (kazooya) – Haskell
Kevin Smith (kevsmith) – Erlang
Dave Fayram (kirindave) – Erlang
Edward Kmett (kmett) – Haskell
Kevin Scaldeferri (kscaldef) – Erlang
Matthew Podwysocki (mattpodwysocki) – F#, Haskell
Mark Reid (mdreid) – Haskell
Mickaël Rémond (mickael) – Erlang
Andy Adams-Moran (morabbin) – Haskell
Neil Bartlett (njbartlett) – Haskell
Nick Gerakines (ngerakines) – Erlang
Paul Brown (paulrbrown) – Haskell
Paul Snively (psnively) – OCaml
Rusty Klophaus (rklophaus) – Erlang
Robey Pointer (robey) – Scala
Shae Erisson (shapr) – Haskell
Sigbjorn Finne (sigbjorn_finne) – Haskell
Dan Piponi (sigfpe) – Haskell
Spencer Janssen (spencerjanssen) – Haskell
Steve Jenson (jenson) – Scala

Isaac Jones (SyntaxPolice) – Haskell
Manuel Chakravarty (TacticalGrace) – Haskell
Tom Moertel (tmoertel) – Haskell
Thomas Sutton (thsutton) – Haskell
Joel Reymont (wagerlabs) – Erlang
Creighton Hogg (wchogg) – Haskell
Joe Williams (williamsjoe) – Erlang
Yariv Sadan (yarivs) – Erlang

I should get the finger brace off in about 6 weeks, and ought to have somewhat decent use of that finger once more by the spring. I’m looking forward to being able to catch a thrown ball again!

The Haskell symposium has gotten off to a great start, with very good talks that have blended practicality and theory.

Since CUFP (Commercial Users of Functional Programming) is the most externally visible part of the conference, I’ll attempt to do some more extensive writeups tomorrow.

Update: Oh, I forgot to mention earlier: I’m giving a half-day Haskell tutorial on Saturday morning. It should be a lot of fun!

Since the machine was still under warranty, Lenovo repaired it, and I was very pleased by their responsiveness at the time. I sent the machine off on a Tuesday, and got it back on a Thursday.

A few months later, and now I’m not so happy. The bloody thing just developed the same overheating problem again, only now it’s idling at 61C, and its warranty just expired. I’m going to call Lenovo support and see what they say, but Jeremy has seen the same problem on his X60, too: I suspect that this line of laptops may just be prone to having its heat sinks come loose.

Regardless, it’s an annoying situation: I can’t do anything more intensive than text editing and web browsing without the machine dying, and a repair will probably be expensive and simply fail again after a short while.

When I was looking around at alternatives to the X60 from other manufacturers, they were all inferior, most often in several ways at once: more expensive, slower, poorer specs, and heavier. Fast forward a year in the market: the X61 has a few minor spec improvements over the X60, and comparable models from other companies are still mediocre and bulky. The only change is that I’m now reluctant to spend the money on new Lenovo kit. What do I do?

You can use fruit and vegetables’ as a voltaic battery but they could only power something like a small LED bulb, no way would there be enough power to charge an iPod

Depends on how many you use… you need to have enough in series to give a high enough voltage, and then a heap in parallel for more current.

This reminds me my “electric snail fence” when I was a child… I was making batteries using lemons, brass screws, and nails to power a small electric fence using a pair of copper wires wrapped around matchstick “fenceposts” to keep snails in an enclosure (I was studying them).

At first, a single lemon seemed to be enough to discourage them from attempting to cross both wires… on touching both they would quickly retract and turn back.

However, snails kept leaving my enclosure… somehow when I was not looking they seemed to be able to cross the fence. So I started bumping up the voltage with more lemons in series. This clearly had an impact on the snails… now when they touched both wires of the fence they would rapidly fully retract into their shells and take some time before they even considered moving again.

But somehow, they still kept leaving… after adding more and more and more lemons and having no success, I decided to pull out the big guns and swapped the lemons for a 9V battery. Now the snails seemed to nearly have a heart-attack when they touched the fence; they would snap back into their shells and spew out a green froth, taking ages to work up the courage to come out again.

But they still kept leaving the enclosure… I was at a loss trying to figure out how these cunning snails were defeating my high-powered fence when I was not looking… and then I noticed all the bird tracks inside my fence.

Except for one show, that is. Soupy Norman is a Polish soap opera (Pierwsza miÅ‚ość), dubbed into English and utterly twisted out of recognition by a team of Irish comedians. The writing, air of absurdity, and comic timing are pitch-perfect. (Mind you, the Cork accents might be a bit tough for non-native ears to decipher. My wife kept asking me “can you really understand what they’re saying?”)

The craic team of bloggers at National Disgrace have kindly provided an index to every Soupy Norman episode on YouTube. Watch them right away.