Why separate compilation is a good thing
I was talking with a friend about why I hate C++ (it’s actually a complicated tolerate/hate relationship), and mentioned that templates don’t have separate compilation. “That’s not really a big deal”, my friend replied. I remember a time when I thought the same thing. So what if I have to recompile some other stuff when [...]
What’s a natural transformation?
For some reason I’ve had a great amount of trouble learning category theory. I think a lot of that is that most of the literature sucks. But I don’t blame it, in fact I find it encouraging, because it indicates that there is a brain-rewiring involved: people who know category theory cannot teach it, because [...]
Music Gear Review
Over the past couple years, I have accumulated many thousands of dollars of musical equipment. I thought I would take some time to review the pros and cons of what I’ve purchased for future imitators :-). You can hear this gear in action in all the SNW recordings. Main keyboard: Nord Stage 76 I bought [...]
C’est la vie
A comment arrived a few minutes ago asking for details of the life flux I mentioned in passing here. I was messing with my blog and had to restore from backup, so I lost the original comment. Sorry, whoever you were. Back in December a message arrived on haskell-cafe announcing a Haskell job opportunity in [...]
Blog Upgrade
I just gave WordPress a much-needed upgrade, from version 1.3 to the latest version 2.5. I have to say, WordPress 2.5 is a very nice piece of software. I was extremely pleased by the upgrade process, which painlessly preserved my archives all the way back to 2003, even from such an old version. Commercial upgrade [...]
Symphonic Poem no. 1
I just finished, in some sense, the first of a series (hopefully) of symphonic poems. I took a long break in the middle of writing this, so I could be mistaken, but I think it took about 20 hours total. It still needs a little tweaking; in particular some of the harmonies on the climaxes [...]
SNW Backlogging
SNW is dead :-(. But I still have some recordings lying around that I’m gradually editing. Here’s the first batch, from March 20: 01 02 – a minimalist (in the classical sense) exercise 03 04 – fun and funky 05 – a long piece with many sections, pretty upbeat #01 and #03 are included for [...]
Stop Using Undecidable Instances
I’d say a good 5% of the threads on the haskell-cafe mailing list have something to do with the typechecker doing strange unexpected things. And the test code for 100% of these features one of the two lines: {-# LANGUAGE UndecidableInstances #-} {-# -fallow-undecidable-instances #-} There was one today asking why the typechecker was getting [...]
Git Revolution
I’ve been learning about git, and have generally been excited about the distributed model. I mean, I used svk, but a robust distributed model is quite exciting. Tonight I had a completely crazy idea: to make a game around git. I brainstormed and I brainstormed, many brains rained. And then it hit me: this is [...]
Recent Comments