Someone sent me a link to this interesting article. It does a good job of explaining some of the reasons that Haskell is such an interesting language.
Category Archives: Technology
DFS Installation Tutorial
Suramya Tomar has written a very nice tutorial on installing Debian from my Debian From Scratch images (or from DFS images you build yourself). Nice and thorough work.
When Newsreaders Aren’t
I clicked on a headline for an article titled Firefox news readers run the gamut. Sounded interesting; I’m not particularly happy with slrn, but I use it because there’s nothing better.
I thought it would be odd that there would be more than one newsreader, and one integrated into Firefox no less. So I was curious and clicked the link.
Surprise — it wasn’t talking about news readers at all, but rather RSS aggregators.
GRRR.
A news reader should be for *Usenet*.
Speaking of which, RSS is superflous. One could use NNTP to publish headlines and summaries anyway, and not require the development of a whole slew of software for yet another annoying protocol.
The Surprising Legacy of Y2K
Remember Y2K? Here’s an interesting story looking back on it: The Surprising Legacy of Y2K.
Form Bookmarklets
Found a great collection of little utilities: Form Bookmarklets. These are little things you can drag to your Firefox bookmark toolbar and give you one-click access to various little utilities.
My two favorites can toggle the state of all checkboxes on a page, or convert a POST form into a (bookmarkable) GET one.
Darcs use case
Here is a simple example illustrating the coolness of Darcs over, say, Arch or anything else.
Trying out XFS
I’ve used most of the different filesystems in Linux. My most recent favorite has been JFS, but things like starvation with find have really been annoying me lately. To summarize, here is my experience with filesystems:
- ext2: very slow, moderately unreliable
- ext3: somewhat slow but reliable
- reiserfs: fast, unreliable (cross-linked data after crash issues)
- jfs: usually fast, somewhat unreliable (similar issues after crash, plus weird charset issues)
The one major Linux FS not in that list is XFS. So I decided to give it a whirl, switching my 40GB /home on one machine to XFS. So far, it’s been good.
There are two articles at IBM developerworks about XFS that were useful. There’s also a useful filesystems comparison from Novell.
A darcs that can pull from git
Sweet.
Juliusz Chroboczek has announced a working prototype of a darcs that can pull from git. This follows a long discussion on darcs-devel about how darcs could interoperate with git.
Benefits from a real world switch from CVS to darcs
I found this article while surfing today. Looks like a good read:
Benefits from a real world switch from CVS to darcs
One thing the author didn’t mention, since everything is presumably on a LAN in their environment, is the substantial performance benefits in darcs from not having to hit the net for so many activities.
darcs-buildpackage
Finally, I’ve released darcs-buildpackage, a system for using Darcs to track the history of Debian packages. Now I can convert the last of my Arch repositories to Darcs.
I wrote darcs-buildpackage in Haskell. It took about half the number of lines of code that tla-buildpackage required in Python.