Brandon Simmons' website

I’m doing Stanford’s free online [NLP class](NLP class), and last week’s lesson introduced Levenshtein Distance and the traditional matrix-based algorithm.

This was a quick, on-a-whim sort of project that ended up taking me all week, as I learned my way around template haskell.

med. format prints here always taken with a yashica 635 TLR and printed at safelight, in Studio Two Three.

This is me recording some half-formed thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for the last week.

In reading about overlapping instances in haskell, I came across this proposal that mentioned that: [Overlapping types] can sometimes be simulated with the extra-method trick used in the Show class of the Prelude for showing lists of characters differently

For my own purposes, I wanted to take a tour of all the various formulations of lenses on hackage and thought I would post the lightly-curated results here.

pez is a powerful, generic zipper library that can be used with a minimum of boilerplate, using fclabels lenses as an interface.

I’m Brandon Simmons, a freelance programmer, photographer, and musician based out of Richmond, VA, USA.

Just a quick announcement of the release of simple-actors, a DSL-style haskell library for more structured concurrent programs via the Actor Model.

Sebastiaan Visser et al. last week announced the release of v1.0 of fclabels.

Whaa?

EDIT: I’ve just released version 0.1.0 of this library.

UPDATE: This project is on hold for now.

I’m happy to announce the release of a zipper library I namedPEZ!

This post details instructions for making and launching a fire balloon successfully.

This is a bit of literate haskell code that works through a system for running concurrent IO computations that are synchronized on a stream.

That’s the question.

In response to a request and my own review I’ve modified my directory-tree package as follows: Eq and Ord instances now compare on free “contents” type variable we provide equalShape function for comparison of shape and filenames of arbitrary trees (ignor…

If the title hasn’t scared you off yet, here’s the story: I was hacking on someone else’s code on the plane and trying to wrap my head around some Applicative class code; in particular the code in question used the Applicative instance for ((->) a) i.e. f…

I’ve just started trying to learn and debug Template Haskell and found it a bit rough trying to explore TH interactively, but a couple of things have helped.

Haskell’s standard State monad types allow the programmer to define a computation that works with some state in a way that looks and feels similar to using mutable state in an imperative language.

I’ve been collaborating with Gabor Greif on a new version of his ’thrist’ module, which was just released last night!

Like the Lambda Calculus (on which Lisp is based), Combinatory Logic is a formal system that can be used to model and study computation.

If you have set up your hackintosh using Meklort’s NetbookBootMaker / NetbookInstaller and have overwritten the Chameleon bootloader with GRUB or have otherwise damaged your MBR, you can use some of the following techniques to fix your issues.

Note: this is part of a series of posts is related to the “17x17 Challenge” posted by Bill Gasarch.

Computer science is a fascinating and maddening thing.

Note: this is part of a series of posts is related to the “17x17 Challenge” posted by Bill Gasarch.

Note: this is part of a series of posts is related to the “17x17 Challenge” posted by Bill Gasarch.

I’ve fixed a bug related to upgrading GHC to version 6.12 (thanks to Cale and the folks on haskell-cafe who helped me with the issue) and got my Befunge-93 interpreter up on hackage.

The Problem Problem A in the qualifying round of this year’s Google CodeJam contest was really clever.

Note: this is part of a series of posts is related to the " 17x17 Challenge" posted by Bill Gasarch.

We don’t usually give much thought to Numeric data types beyond whether we want to work with integers or decimal numbers.

This is part of a series of posts is related to the " 17x17 Challenge" posted by Bill Gasarch.

This is part of a series of posts is related to the “17x17 Challenge” posted by Bill Gasarch.

I’ve been puzzling over some of the problems presented by the 17 x 17 Challenge, and wanted to share some of what I’ve learned and have been wondering about.

I finally got some time to code up a messy script to test out a few variations of an algorithm to generate rectangle-free single colorings of a grid, as part of a lazy humble effort to solve the 17 x 17 challenge.

I’ve been making notes when I have time, on the “17 x 17 challenge” posted a couple months back by Bill Gasarch.

The function groupBy from haskell’s standard library is defined in terms of span, the effect being that the supplied predicate function is used to compare the first element of a group with successive elements.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about a category of functions that are always a bit awkward to define: they involve cases where we would like to traverse a recursive data structure and do something with the data that we have passed over but which is…

I just finished an initial release of an interpreter for the befunge programming language, based on the ‘93 spec.

This is the third post of mine on DeBruijn sequences, and is in preparation for another post to come which I hope should be an interesting investigation into a possible parallel algorithm.

Here is some code I whipped up in response to an interesting problem posted on reddit.com/r/coding/.

UPDATE: Thanks to steve for pointing out that the scheme I describe here is essentially the same as Algorithm BSTW.

To follow up my last post about the Burrows-Wheeler Transform, I decided to implement another simple algorithm which is often used after the BWT to help consolidate localized redundancy in the data before entropy encoding.

Here is a quick post to get me back into the swing of blogging.

I’ve written this brief tutorial on haskell’s State monad to help bridge some of the elusive gaps that I encountered in other explanations I’ve read, and to try to cut through all the sticky abstraction.

For this post I will rework the Prefer One algorithm from the previous post so that it is much more efficient.

date = “a” slug = “a/cracking-a-lock-in-haskell-with-the-de-bruijn-sequence-pt-1” Part 2.