Previously I was using textile with jekyll. This one is generated by markdown with octopress. Builtin support for code snippets is way more impressive. More features! Less work!

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print "Hello World"

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#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
    printf("Hello World\n");
}

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public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World");
    }
}

Also I’m using Jekyll to render the various pages on the website. WordPress was an option but this is a simpler approach and potentially more fun. The only downside is I have to code features myself.

Here is a nice new feature (that came at almost zero cost): Syntax highlighting!

Some ruby code….

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def foo
    puts 'foo'

Some haskell code….

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-- This is a super elegant solution to the question found on the wiki. I got it after
-- tracing through it for awhile. My head hurts.
combinations1 :: Int -> [a] -> [[a]]
combinations1 0 _ = [ [] ]
combinations1 n xs = [ y:ys | y:xs' <- tails xs, ys <- combinations1 (n - 1) xs' ]

All the blog posts were migrated over. Comments didn’t get migrated over. Some images link will be dead going forward. This blog doesn’t have a large audience so it’s not a major concern.

These were the packages I installed to complete the dependencies:

• libzlib1g-dev
• libgmp3-dev
• freeglut3
• freeglut3-dev
• libglew1.5
• libglew1.5-dev
• libglu1-mesa
• libglu1-mesa-dev
• libgl1-mesa-glx
• libgl1-mesa-dev

Rather than installing GHC from the Ubuntu repositories, I used the GHC 6.12.3 generic binary from haskell.org

Afterwards, I downloaded the source for the Haskell platform (see here) and followed the instructions for installing it.

The biggest annoyance right now is that the Nvidia GTX 470 graphics card is not 100% compatible with Linux (Ubunutu specifically). I can get Linux running but the resolution under X is hideous without the Nvidia driver and with the Nvidia driver I get random system freezes.

So for now, I'm living with Windows 7. It's not the most pleasant experience. However combined with VM player I'm able to get some of my Linux development environment goodness.

Hopefully the graphics issue gets resolved before or early in the new year.

A couple of quick thoughts:

1. Enjoyed the tutorial on "High Performance Haskell" (slides here). I've spent the last year learning about Haskell but I'm not completely comfortable with it yet. The level of this tutorial was just about right. None of the stuff was over my head.

2. F# shows a lot of promise. I don't use any MS developer products but I'm considering getting Visual Studio to try out F#. It looks like a functional programming language with the fit and polish of the mainstream programming languages e.g. Java, C#

3. Side effects, imperative style are not optimal but sometimes they are very useful. This was a comment that was made in different forms over various talks. It surprised me a little but it shouldn't have. Haskell has affected my day to day work by making me more mindful about side effects. Perhaps that is the biggest thing functional programming can teach working programmers, to understand the various trade offs you make when you apply the different programming language paradigms (functional, imperative, oo).

4. Lots of people appear to be using Scala, Erlang and Ocaml to do serious work even if they're not blogging about it.

5. Not much was said about Clojure. This was a little surprising. 

Overall, it was a worthwhile two days and I learnt a lot. Still digesting the conference material and will be doing that for awhile. 

I recently picked up an iPad. Surfing the web and checking email has made my daily bus commute way more enjoyable. Rather than doing the morning email and web surfing from home, I can do it on the bus. This is a real time saver.

The iPad, like the smaller iPhone, is a fantastic device for taking on the move. The iPad may just be a bigger iPod Touch but the bigger screen, to me at least, makes the difference between night and day. I admit in the beginning I didn't see how the iPad could replace my Lenovo IdeaPad which was a portable device that I took almost everywhere. I could write code on my IdeaPad and it ran Linux after all! 

It came down to 2 things: 

1. 95% of what I did was surfing the web, writing and capturing ideas. 

2. Have you tried using a keyboard while standing? This makes difference when you're moving and want to check something. (I got used to the virtual keyboard. It's not the optimal solution for typing)

I still like my IdeaPad but all technology gets outdated by something newer and sleeker. I don't like it but I have no qualms about the engine of progress and a newer shinier version of the iPad in the future. 

Aside, I'm surprised by how much the Kindle gets dissed on though, that e-ink display is still the closest thing to paper I've seen on a display. I can use the iPad in hourly bursts but when I want to unwind for a couple of hours with a good story my first choice is still the kindle. Winnie and Alice are flashy but really distract me from reading the book. It's not new, sleek and shiny I guess and that makes sense.

 Sent from my iPad but edited on my desktop.

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bash$ export CLASSPATH=`join.pl ~/.swank-clojure/*`

bash$ echo $CLASSPATH

/Users/dc/.swank-clojure/clojure-1.1.0-master-20091202.150145-1.jar:/Users/dc/.swank-clojure/clojure-contrib-1.1.0-master-20091212.205045-1.jar:/Users/dc/.swank-clojure/swank-clojure-1.1.0.jar

This script gave me to the chance to try out my perl 5.10.1 distribution and a new perl 5.10 features e.g. say and Modern::Perl

My main takeaway from the presentation is developing applications on the Java platform with the right language for the problem. For example, my core business logic (representing the “hard” parts of my architecture) might be built with Java / Scala to provide the additional guarantee of type safety and then utilizing a dynamic language like JRuby, Jython, Groovy et al for scripting, writing unit tests. 

From the presentation I was introduced to a new CLI tool available in Java 6: jrunscript

The -q option shows all the scripting engines available. When I run it on my Mac, 

dc@feynman:jrunscript$ jrunscript -q

Language ECMAScript 1.6 implemention “Mozilla Rhino” 1.6 release 2

Language AppleScript 2.0.1 implemention “AppleScriptEngine” 1.0

ECMAScript was not surprising. I had known that a Javascript interpreter had been embedded in Java 6 for awhile but I found the AppleScript engine interesting. I’ve always thought that AppleScript was a weird language. Weird but useful on the Mac. If I could use AppleScript to extract data out of applications running on my Mac, I could process the data with Java (or another JVM based language like clojure).

For a first pass, I wanted to make a Java + AppleScript program put up a Growl message. After a quick crash course with AppleScript and Script Editor, I had this:

and on the Java side:

There were a couple of gotchas which I’ll summarize.

1) You can’t appear to set arbitrary variables with the various Binding/ScriptContext methods. 

2) To pass values, you have to define a “main” function for the script. That’s what this line was doing

applescript.put(“javax_script_function”, “growlNotification”);

It set growlNotification as the “main” function for the script.

3) growlNotification has 2 parameters. To pass arguments, I needed to define a List interface and add my two arguments there. This sort of made sense since the key we use to set the binding says “ARGV”. When I initially passed my 2 arguments via an array, I received an error message. After a little bit of trial and error, I found that using a List interface worked. The documentation around this is spotty but the use of a List is somewhat intuitive. 

What’s next? Possibly doing this with Clojure and learning more about the various application APIs (aka dictionaries in AppleScript parlance). 

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Sent from my iPhone

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link

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