I’ve recently found myself not blogging because I didn’t wish to inflict the posts on Planet Atlassian. So now anything non-technical which I don’t think is of interest to subscribers to this blog (Hi to both of you!) appears here.
Along with some colleagues I entered the ICFP programming contest this year.
You can read some more about our experience at Matt’s blog.
I thought the problem — guiding a Mars rover to a goal amongst obstacles — was very well chosen. It was possible to navigate the example maps with very simple software, so everyone could [...]
I’m much happier with the second version:
out3 a = let renderGroup g = let char = head g; [...]
My colleague Matt Ryall wrote about this simple algorithm for marking up a series of letters — which is complex enough to be interesting.
I wrote a version in CAL:
arr = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'e', 'f', 'e', 'f', 'e', 'f', 'a', [...]
This site has potential to be quite interesting, depending on the quality of the instructions.
It may also self select an interesting group of people — I wonder what a version of Slashdot which only those people knew about would be like?
The launch of Google’s AppEngine has given me the obligation to find out what it’s all about, and the opportunity to learn a bit more about one of our products, Crowd — and, of course, pick up some Python along the way.
I began by working through Google’s Guestbook example, and then replaced its use of [...]
aka, attack of the TLAs.
This webapp’s architecture is depicted below:
The browser runs a Javascript thick client compiled from Java by GWT. Some of the classes have CAL annotations. These don’t affect the client, but allow the server side of the GWT RPC protocol to call CAL functions. The CAL functions store persistent data using Software Transactional [...]
I’ve been interested in GWT as a way of building rich Internet applications since it appeared, and I’m very pleased to see it getting better and better.
So it’s natural that I’d want to try using it with CAL, a functional language quite similar to Haskell which runs on the JVM.
I used a similar approach to [...]
Fuel additives seem to be the most popular science-based scam outside of alternative medicine.
I’m not sure whether the promoters primarily make their money from investors or customers, but it seems that there’s enough money in it to keep a steady stream of ‘inventions’ coming.
The press (or ‘mainstream media’ as us bloggers call it) loves the [...]
Apple ships good developer documentation with OS X, and Xcode provides a good UI for searching it, but as I’m a beginner I like to read the conceptual documentation all the way through.
I don’t like reading long documents on a screen, so I print out the documents I want to read 2-up on single sided [...]