r-wos.org

I’m not a big fan of anything in list form, really, but I do keep TODO lists. I’m currently using Trello for that. Trello is great, but it invites one (well, me) to play with it. That is, to create new lists and re-order stuff and label it and re-label it, and so on. The…

I’m currently playing around with functional reactive programming, specifically Racket’s FrTime language/library. I haven’t done that much with it, yet – I’ve just thrown together some small scripts, playing with the concept. But I can say this: if you haven’t programmed anything in a reactive style yet, drop everything you’re doing, get to your machine,…

(part 1) My first idea of how we could simplify creating graphical user interfaces was to just take a unix pipe and to either render something graphical for each component, or only one input-element and one output element. That is, for example find ./ -name *.c | xargs grep -n “[^f]gets” | vi – would…

A month ago, a nice little blog post made rounds on the internet. It describes the joys of having a Forever Project, a project that can’t be completed but that you also can’t stop to think about. Needless to say, I quite liked it. I used to think that I was just not productive enough,…

Apparently, recruiting spammers are making progress – they now have a perl script that parses github user profiles: Subject: Data mining project Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2013 10:44:06 -0000 From: “Tanya Kotwall” <tanya.kotwall@njfeurope.com> To: <richard@r-wos.org> Hi Richard, Notice your github online.. (was trying to understand the my_brain_hurts repositories) A contact of mine founded trustyou.com in…

Some months ago, Racket 5.3 introduced a new generics library. As you would expect, it’s basically a convenient way to implement generic interfaces for related type-specific operations (for example generic queue operations for different queue implementations). That’s all fine and works well, but it doesn’t (as of now) support dispatching for more than one function…

This is a post about the bullshit one has to put up with in an “enterprise” PHP shop. I wrote it some months ago. I have since left that job, but I haven’t published the text yet. It’s a well-known internet law that one cannot leave a PHP rant unpublished – so here it is.…

I’ve just discovered this by accident: one can make infinite recursive loops in vim. It’s very simple: just record a macro and in that macro apply that macro. That may seem useless but it’s not: I’m now finally able to port my very first program to vim. The original form was: In vim: type <ESC>…

This page now has a linear-gradient background image – as you might have noticed if you haven’t clicked the “too much green” button in the header. Did you also notice that it’s not really a linear gradient, but more a bunch of stripes? Yeah, that’s why we need more than 24 bit color depth. The…

I got an ebook reader for christmas, and I generally like it. It’s a Kobo Touch because Amazon needs the competition. It does everything a book does, only better. The display is just as readable but I’m not tied to insane typeface or font size choices of the publisher. It’s lighter than most books and…