Daily Archives: November 18, 2008

Real World Haskell Update

Programming,

Times are exciting. Our book, Real World Haskell, is now available in a number of venues. But before I get to that, I’ve got to talk about what a thrill this project has been.

I created our internal Darcs repository in May, 2007. Since then, the three of us has made 1324 commits — and that doesn’t count work done by copyeditors and others at O’Reilly.

We made available early drafts of the book online for commenting, which served as our tech review process. By the time we finished writing the book, about 800 people had submitted over 7,500 comments. I’ve never seen anything like it, and really appreciate all those that commented about it.

As for availability, RWH is available:

  • For immediate purchase with electronic delivery, from O’Reilly’s page
  • For immediate viewing on Safari Books Online, at its book page
  • Paper editing timing is still tentative, but we’re estimating arrival in bookstores the week of December 8.

People are talking about it on blogs, twitter, etc. We’re excited!

Frozen Bicycling

Outdoors

Some of you might recall that I’ve been bicycling to work, about 10 miles each way.

Over the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to ride much because it’s been too muddy. Today I rode to work.

It was about 25F-30F out there, so this was my first below-freezing bicycle ride. It went OK, though I was somewhat on the cool side — I’ll add more layers next time.

Today, I wore wool socks, bicycling shorts, tights over that, my short sleeve shirt, a long-sleeve shirt over it, full gloves, and a balaclava. I should have worn probably one more layer everywhere, but I survived and I’m not frozen.

You may now commence speculation about whether or not I am crazy.

Web Design Companies That Understand Technology

Online Life, Software

There are a lot of companies out there that do web design work that looks fabulous.

Unfortunately, a lot of these sites look fabulous only when viewed in IE6 build xxxx, with a 75dpi monitor, fonts set to the expected size, running on Windows XP SP2, with JavaScript enabled. Try looking at the site through Safari, Firefox, with larger-than-expected fonts, and things break down: text boxes overlap each other, buttons that should work don’t, and it becomes a mess.

So, if your employer wanted a web design company that has a good grasp of Web standards and the appropriate use of them, where would you look? A company that can write good HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and still make the site look appealing? A company that has heard of Apache and gets the appropriate nausea when someone mentions ColdFusion or Frontpage?

So far, I’ve seen these places mentioned by others:

WebDevStudios.com
Happy Cog
Crowd Favorite