kaashif's blog: Computers, with some mathematics on the side

What is frog?

Before a few weeks ago, I was always one of those people who said that Lisp isn't useful, it's not type-safe, it's not pure, Haskell is better etc etc ad nauseam.

Is it portable?

I know that sometimes, I've bene stuck in an airport or in a coffee shop without internet.

You know something that really annoys me?

There are a few Platform as a Service (PaaS) services out there, and the most famous is probably Heroku.

Earlier, I was trying to find something I could talk about at my school's maths society.

The other day, I was trying to access http://sharelatex.com at school, and it didn't really work, probably due to a combination of Internet Explorer and possibly an overzealous filter that could have been blocking something.

UPDATE: I now use Mercurial on the client side (i.e. everything I do locally involves hg) and Git on the server-side.

Back in the day, I used to use Slackware.

Earlier today, I was discussing operating systems and came onto the subject of ease of installation.

I've heard a lot of things about Racket (well really, things about many different Lisp dialects), and most of them were good.

I've seen many completely stupid articles where people furiously circlejerk over how Vim is the best and nothing will ever come close, but it's rare that I see anyone write much about Emacs, probably because fewer people use it (or maybe Emacs attracts a…

Recently, I've been trying to understand the ins and outs of CVS in order to be able to contribute to OpenBSD without messing up anything.

Recently, I've been trying to get away from pre-packaged file sharing solutions (e.g.

People like to say that learning Haskell is hard, because a pure, lazy, functional language isn't something most people are used to.

Earlier, I saw this article claiming to describe how to share a file "simply" by running Python's web server module (with either Python 2 or 3).

The inspiration for this came from this blog post, where the author describes how he uses his computer.

I'm sure lots of people (dozens, perhaps) have installed OpenBSD on ThinkPad T61s of some description, but with the recent release of OpenBSD 5.5, lots of documentation has become (or already was, and now is even more so) obsolete, like this article_on_a_…

On all of my computers, I like being efficient.

There is always a lot of buzz around the idea of "learning to program".

UPDATE: I now use Hakyll.

After a few months of running a website, there are a few things I have realised about how I ran my server when it was first delivered, and how I run it now.

UPDATE: The project died, it went nowhere.

When I first started programming, I barely had any idea of what constituted a good text editor, or why I'd want to use some old, texty editor from the 90s which didn't even have most of the features I took for granted in the IDE I was using at the time.

Over the years, I've used a few different OSes and desktop environments, and the one I use currently is portable to many operating systems, mostly due to the efforts of the writers of i3 over at i3wm.org, but also the standards-compliance of POSIX, meaning

Whenever you hear something about Haskell, chances are it sounds arcane and involves lots of complicated and intimidating mathematical language.

When running a website on a residential connection, a problem one might run into is the dynamic IP address usually assigned by one's ISP.

If you have spent time on programming or technology boards like /g/ or /r/programming, chances are you might have heard the word "monad" thrown around a lot.

There are a few very important things that everyone involved in software (particularly free software) can do to help out.

While I did have some old hardware lying around, I had never committed to actually getting that hardware usable.

stow is a cool little Perl script which basically just creates and deletes symlinks.

For a few years now, I have been using Vim to edit config files, program in C, Python, even Lisp (people apparently think that Vim isn't the best for programming in Lisp).

This tutorial is designed for those who have programmed before, perhaps in a higher level language like Python or Ruby.

Often, people look at me oddly when I suggest that they email me something.

This article is not only about disk wiping, it will hopefully teach you something about using some GNU command line tools .

Installing packages from source Recently, I had SSHed into one of Debian Stable virtual machines I was using as a file server.

You probably have not heard of LaTeX before now.

Imagine you're a person on some sort of device, using the internet.

Why am I writing this?