http://gimbo.org.uk/blog 8 years of rambling and mumbling Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:18:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As of a few minutes ago, you can download free mp3s of music made by me via Combinator's page on last.fm. (You could listen online since October 2008, but I'm 99% sure "free download" wasn't an option at that point.) Or if you prefer, how about a 200MB zip containing ... http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2010/02/24/want-to-download-music-made-by-me-well-now-you-can/ I've just uploaded version 0.0.1 of the simple-observer package to hackage, the Haskell package repository. This is an implementation of the Observer design pattern in Haskell. I am not the originator or even main author of the code in this package; that is Dutch computer scientist Bastiaan Heeren, who wrote ... http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/11/12/simple-observers-in-haskell/ I'm going to be doing some Gimboland maintenance over the next couple of days/weeks, so if things disappear or go doolally, that's why. Ta! http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/11/10/maintenance-time/ I see it as, when the limestone of imperative programming is worn away, the granite of functional programming will be observed. Simon Peyton Jones (I'm still not quite sure why I wrote this. You should just go and buy the book. But maybe someone will be interested.) I got my copy ... http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/10/01/coders-at-work-simon-peyton-jones/ Haskell's great, and has a lovely documentation generation system called haddock. Even better, if you install one of Haskell's many third-party libraries using the excellent cabal install, it will (if you configure it to do so) generate these docs for you. Having local copies of documentation like this ... http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/09/23/generating-an-index-of-haskell-haddock-docs-automatically/ Here's a nice git cheatsheet, with examples: Everyday GIT With 20 Commands Or So [via brunns]. Really good — and to think that I didn't know about git fsck and git gc! http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/09/17/really-nice-git-cheatsheet/ On my way home from work I had an idea for something I thought I'd find handy. Two hours later, I've written it — in Haskell of course. :-) Context: I occasionally make what might kindly be called music, using computers and the like, and I don't have any ... http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/09/15/a-haskell-shell-for-computing-musical-scales-in-58-lines-of-code/ My life. :-) http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/09/15/on-the-money/ An official apology to Alan Turing. Win. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/09/11/an-official-apology-to-alan-turing/ Why is There Peace? — violence is declining, over history, at least in relative terms, though not, one suspects, absolute ones. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/08/10/why-is-there-peace/ I've just written a solution to today's Programming Praxis puzzle, which requires you, essentially, to write a Monte Carlo attack on the Monty Hall problem. Thus, the awful pun in this post's title, in case you missed it. ;-) Here's my solution. It was a lot of fun. I ... http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/07/25/a-monte-hall-problem-solved-in-haskell/ I love this idea [via lifehacker]. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/05/30/diy-magnetic-spice-rack/ You haven't experienced true joy until you've watched this cockatoo dancing to Ray Charles [via nicolas]. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/05/12/shake-a-shake-a-shake-a-tail-feather/ Alan Dix on the difference between how humans parse language, and how machines do so — and associated impacts on interaction. Interesting stuff, as ever. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/05/10/alan-dix-on-language-and-action-sequential-associative-parsing/ Heading to Cornwall on a train last Friday, I spotted something interesting as we neared Bristol Temple Meads: Eastside Roots, a community gardening project — look out for it by Stapleton Road station. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/04/29/eastside-roots/ I am that man. (Shame the sound quality on the video's so poor though.) http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/04/28/i-once-told-her/ Christopher Hitchens gets waterboarded [via Dawkins]. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/04/24/believe-me-its-torture/ Anti-evolutionists sometimes use the human eye as an argument for a creator; here's David Attenborough explaining why that's tosh [via frosty]. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/04/22/the-evolution-of-the-eye/ If Philosophers Were Programmers [brunns]. Nice to see that Wittgenstein (or at least, one of the Wittgensteins) is also a Haskell man... http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/04/21/if-philosophers-were-programmers/ Some truly incredible pictures of Saturn and its friends. http://gimbo.org.uk/blog/2009/04/21/cassinis-continued-mission/