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The Haskell community has a very nice implementation-independent mechanism for building libraries and applications, called Cabal.

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.

Here’s a wonderful excerpt from a book review written by Daniel Dennett, in which he paraphrases Rapaport on how to argue constructively.

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.

Since I started using WordPress to host my blog, I’ve generally been fairly pleased with it.

During my evening’s Haskell-related Googling, I came across a piece of software called Pancito, written by Andrew Cooke.

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.

Rather than bemoan the state of prepackaged Haskell goodness for Fedora, I’ve started down the path of doing something about it.

From the department of microscopic obsessions of the bourgeoisie: I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker since I first came to the US, over a decade ago.

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).

The Hilbert curve is a fractal space-filling curve that is rather pretty to look at. [!

As part of my remedial Haskell learning process, I’ve been getting my feet wet once more with monads.

Since I’ve been away from the Haskell world for a long time, it’s been interesting to return and observe some surprises about the practical side of working with the language.

One of the exciting things about upgrading to Fedora Core 6 is that the yum package manager now frequently hangs on me.

Carol Lloyd at the Chron wrote a second article about our fun with green building in San Francisco recently, which elicited a mention at SocketSite.

Set him on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life. [!

I’ve lately become interested in the Haskell programming language again, after a long time (eleven years!)

Since FC6 ships with Python 2.4, you’re a bit stuck if you want to play with the new features of Python 2.5.

I’ve had a Sony Ericsson Z520a phone for a little under a year now, and as it’s still widely available through cellular carriers, I thought I’d write up my experiences with it.

Jeremy and Muli remind me that x86-class CPUs refill a missed TLB entry in hardware.

In an earlier post, I briefly discussed the oprofile system profiler.

I just read some notes from an entertaining talk (one that’s surprisignly accessible, even if you’re neither a computer scientist nor a string theorist) that Scott Aaronson recently gave at Stanford, and came across this gem: But what could NP-hardness po…

Inspired by a discussion on a mailing list, I dug up a copy of Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s Figments of Reality, to find the definition of the zombike. […] We begin with a topic that has greatly excited many philosophers: along with Dennett, we think it is

“Uh oh.

Inspired by this Language Log article, a few newly minted words and fresh observations from home: Indispensable kid’s verb of the year: to “attackle”.

If you’ve had to do much performance tuning on a Linux system, you may have come across the oprofile system profiler.

If you use IRC to collaborate on a software project, chances are you’ve come across pastebin.com, a site where you can post snippets of code, program output, patches, and the like, and then give out the URL of the snippet to other people in the channel yo…

Local scientists, ancient reptiles, volcanic eruptions, and Antarctica!

If you’re using a fairly modern laptop with an Intel chipset, the chances are that it has an Intel ICH7 I/O controller hub: $ lspci | grep -i ide 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01)

During a lunchtime conversation the other day, a coworker mentioned that he was hacking in his spare time on an entry for the Netflix Prize.

Some time ago, I read a Nature review (subscription required) of Doug Macdougall’s “Frozen Earth”.