Blog Archives

Why you should not use pyinotify

A while ago, I had a need to monitor filesystem modifications, and I looked around for Python bindings for the Linux kernel’s inotify subsystem. At the time, the only existing library was pyinotify, so being a lazy sort, I naturally

Posted in python

LLVM bindings for Haskell

I’ve spent a bit of time over the past few days putting together some LLVM bindings for Haskell, based on Gordon Henriksen’s C bindings. (If you don’t know what LLVM is, it’s a wonderful toybox of compiler components, from a

Posted in haskell, open source

Design your functions for partial application

Every language’s standard library has its weak spots. In C, for example, the stdio functions don’t have a consistent notion of where the FILE * belongs in the argument list. For fwrite, it goes at the end; for fseek, it’s

Posted in haskell

BLDGBLOG interviews Kim Stanley Robinson

Here is an absolute treat: a long, lively interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, conducted on one of my favourite blogs, BLDGBLOG. At its best (the Three Californias trilogy, Antarctica), Robinson’s writing is at once haunting and beautifully evocative of a

Posted in reading, science

GHC 6.8.1, gtk2hs 0.9.12.1 now available for Fedora 8

If you use Fedora 8, GHC 6.8.1 will be in the stable repository within 24 hours or so. I’ve also pushed a compatible build of gtk2hs 0.9.12.1 to the stable repository.
Posted in haskell

GHC 6.8.1 pushed to Fedora 8 testing

Upgrading my laptop from F-7 to F-8 yesterday was painless, so I’ve been able to verify that the latest version of GHC works smoothly. I’ve pushed the built packages to the F-8 testing repository, and will bump them to release

Posted in haskell, linux

See me speak at Ignite SF tonight

This evening, I’ll be speaking at the peculiar but fun Ignite SF. My talk is notionally about functional programming, but it’s really about imposing constraints on yourself, and what you can get out of it.

Posted in haskell, open source

Using Emacs to insert SCC annotations in Haskell code

When debugging or profiling Haskell code, it’s common practice to pepper it with cost centre annotations, often called SCC (for strongly connected component set cost centre) annotations. If you compile a program using ghc -prof -auto-all, this causes all of

Posted in haskell

What the heck is a Wide Finder, anyway?

Tim Bray has recently been writing about a simple log file processing task, giving his efforts the (decidedly peculiar) name of Wide Finder. The task at hand is to count popular links in an Apache log file. Here’s my two
Posted in haskell

Pure Haskell MySQL bindings in the works

I’ve spent a few spare hours here and there working on a pure Haskell interface to MySQL recently. On the principle that perhaps someone else might want to join in the fun, I’ve published a darcs repository already (see the

Posted in haskell, open source