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 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 config file, not as [...]
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 one [...]
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 with [...]
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 scm on January 11th, 2007 11 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 behaviours [...]
Posted in haskell, software on January 11th, 2007 6 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 from within [...]
