osfameron’s blog

Blog move

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:51:30 +0100

I've enjoyed using Vox.com over the last couple of months but I'm finally taking the plunge and moving the blog to greenokapi.net/blog. Though I've occasionally wanted more flexibility, the trade-off with a hosted service is that you waste no ti...

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Five things I hate about Perl

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:04:42 +0100

Enough advocacy, let's get to the nitty gritty of 5 things I hate about Perl. (After brian d foy.) The difference between list and scalar context is subtle. One bug that bites people too often is this (for some value of "people", including m...

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More Countdown: laziness, Scheme, and German frogs

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:32:16 +0100

The Countdown code I showed you isn't really taking advantage of Haskell's laziness. We should only have to check entries up until the point that we have enough matches (in the current code 'take 4 $ getAnagrams') and that's good. However, we ha...

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Schwartzian transform in Haskell

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:53:28 +0100

In the last post, I mentioned that we might be able to improve the performance of our sort using a "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartzian_transform". This basically involves precaching the expensive calculation (in this case, length), sorti...

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Countdown words game solver in Haskell

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:02:12 +0100

Will on #geekup has been working on a Countdown letters and numbers game solver written in Python. I thought it'd be fun to try to do it in Haskell, and started with the letters game (anagram) solver. Starting with a string of jumbled letters,...

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Monads in Perl (take 1)

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:27:26 +0100

I've been away for a while from Haskell so I thought I should do some revision and really get my head around Monads. While I plodded through the wonderful "meet the monads" tutorial, I decided that the best way to learn would be to do. By implem...

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"Readable Perl" talk slides up

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:28:43 +0100

Thanks to Chris and Thom for organising the recent GeekUp Liverpool talks. The evening started well with Martin Owen's very interesting talk on justifying Erlang, and why FP is going to become a major factor in tomorrow's concurrency-oriented wor...

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Vista hate

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:11:59 +0100

I'm currently suffering Vista to try to install some development software - on the one hand, for work, and on the other, to play with F# and dotNet. I realised that I need the full version of Visual Studio (the free "Express" version doesn't allo...

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More Liverpool talks: Perl, Erlang

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:31:39 +0100

Thom has posted the details of the next Liverpool geekup, Tuesday May 27th at 3345 Parr Street. Last time, I admitted to programming in Perl and got ribbed about it being unreadable. Fueled by the fervour of the righteous (and maybe a pint or two...

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F# talk in Liverpool

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Fri, 16 May 2008 08:35:07 +0100

I'd been out of Liverpool for 3 years or so, and I completely missed GeekUp: a loosely affiliated, grassroots tech meetup society in the North West. The Liverpool branch is pretty active, and linked with various other groups, such as the DotNet ...

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