Just another lambdabananacamel,

The Digital Economy bill is worrying. I brushed off the wonderful Write to Them service, and wrote the following letter to my MP. (Slightly edited, where I noticed the original letter didn't make grammatical sense...) Dear Louise Ellman, I was concerned that the current Digital Economy Bill has now been passed by the Lords, and [...]

I've been prototyping ways for customers to import data into our system. While some kind of JSON/XML structured data would be easiest for us, our customers like spreadsheets. That's cool of course, and it's easy to mock up imports like this. Product Price Category Brie £ [...]

I enjoyed Aldo Cortesi's rather interesting post about language statistics on github. He's done some good analysis, and there are some interesting nuggets of information to be had about Perl, Haskell (though fewer, as there are only 18 projects that made his criteria) as well as other languages. Of course, there is some silliness there [...]

Just a quick post about this cute scifi-ish radio show, Ben Moor's Undone. Someone pointed me at it a couple of years ago, noting that the protagonist Edna Turner reminded him of the lovely Sally Sparrow from Blink. I loved the wordplay, the surreal alternate reality (for example, "Los muchachos que necesitan la [...]

I have now been without my Nokia N95 8Gb for over two weeks and am increasingly irritable about Vodafone's rather shoddy customer service...

I'll be at the London Perl Workshop tomorrow: it's a free 1-day conference, and was lots of fun last time I attended. I'll be talking on "Functional Pe(a)rls", an extended and updated version of the talk I gave at the Italian workshop, and I'll be discussing Sub::Curried and Monads in Perl. See you [...]

I've never studied Python, but I'd quite like to at some point in the future. It seems very much like Perl with a different set of design criteria. Yeah, there are differences, but compare with C, Lisp, COBOL, and you can see why Perl and Python are clustered together in the "P languages" (Perl/Python/P^HRuby etc.) Actually, that's one [...]

One of the questions in a recent survey on rec.arts.int-fiction asked if we preferred "story" or "puzzle" interactive fiction. Though it's not as much of a binary choice as the wording implied, there are two extremes of a continuum, and many people have a preference towards one end or the other. I'm not a very big IF player, but [...]

I've enjoyed using Vox.com over the last couple of months but I'm finally taking the plunge and moving the blog here to greenokapi.net/blog. Though I've occasionally wanted more flexibility, the trade-off with a hosted service is that you waste no time tinkering, the only thing you can do is write. But the fact that Vox [...]

Ex. 9.9. I banged my head against this exercise on fix for far too long. I've confused myself enough times trying to understand “The Why of Y” paper that I have this silly idea that fixed point combinators (if that's the right terminology) are somehow hard I don't think that setting the question with the hint “(This is tricky!)“ and then [...]