http://greenokapi.net/blog Perl, Haskell, stuff Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:14:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2010/03/16/debill-letter-to-my-mp-louise-ellman/ So, I got a Macbook Pro from $new_company (about which more later) and, as I believe is traditional, here are some notes about the experience. Setup Very nice: no rebooting, things just work from more or less the moment you take it out of the box. (Compare with recent Samsung N140 netbook, whose ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2010/03/08/notes-on-new-macbook-pro/ 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 ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/12/26/spreadsheet-imports-imperative-vs-functional/ 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, ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/12/15/github-language-statistics/ 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, ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/10/12/undone-sci-fi-comedy-on-bbc-radio/ A couple of comments on the first post suggested that I look into the command-line bookkeeping application ledger, or indeed, its Haskell version hledger. They look very interesting, but rather hard to wrap my head around. So though I'm going to bear them in mind for later, I'll carry on doing these ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/10/09/beans-pt2-docs-tests-and-more-types/ Derren Brown recently claimed he would predict the UK lottery numbers, live on television, and then explain how he did it. It's doubtful that he did either — the alternative explanation that he'd actually committed a massive and improbably daring fraud is vastly more likely than the bullshit he ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/09/19/coin-tricks/ I've recently been trying to improve my rather disorganized personal finances. While I previously "managed" by leaving the bulk of the money in my account and hoping that I'd calculated my expenses versus salary roughly correctly, this is suboptimal for answering various questions like "Do I have enough money to go on holiday?" or ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/09/17/the-moose-counts-beans-managing-my-finances-with-perl/ The Portuguese team did a fantastic job with this year's Perl conference YAPC::EU::2009 in Lisbon just last week. What I learnt Lots of companies -- Cisco, Opera, the canton of Geneva, among others -- are proud to use Perl. There is lots of work going on in the ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/08/13/yapceu2009-lisbon-writeup/ While we were discussing how to promote the Italian Perl Workshop, and the planned training on Moose, I noted that there weren't any articles on Moose (Perl's modern OO implementation, inspired by CLOS, Smalltalk and Ruby) on perl.it. Lordarthas of course told me "well volunteered!"... oops. I pointed out that I don't really know ... http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/07/09/a-brief-note-on-technical-translation-jay-kuris-gentle-introduction-to-moose/