October 20, 2006

PopTech vs. Rodgab: FIGHT

Confusing event of the week: Rodrigo y Gabriela playing at PopTech. I would have loved to have been there for the talks but then to have seen them play (outside of an Irish pub, which is where I’ve seen them play three times previously) would have hurt my head with the unlikeliness of it all.

They’re completely worth seeing if you get the chance.

Posted by Oliver at 03:03 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2006

Not the reason why I slowed on the blogging front

“no one — including adults — should have a blog or personal website”

It’s true, I am constantly OMG-ing my way through life. Mental note: put off filthy communication!

Posted by Oliver at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2006

Minor victories

I’m now sufficiently proficient in Haskell to be able to manipulate large databases precisely how I want to. It makes my job that bit easier.

I managed to make GHCi crash too. I smell my first bug report!

Posted by Oliver at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2006

Things to read when you've nothing to read

These are the webcomics I read while waiting for the kettle to boil, or my boss to get off the phone, or for a response to some idle text message… I’ve set up the links to start at the first page of the webcomic.

  • Starslip Crisis - A sci-fi comedy about museums, quantum physics and longing for that girl you’ve not got the guts to make a move on. Updated daily.

  • Gunnerkrigg Court - This one is hard to describe, but handily, Neil Gaiman’s already had a shot: “it’s a semi-gothic funny-sweet school story with mysteries and robots and so forth — but I kept finding myself reminded of the early days of reading Bone.” Well worth reading.

  • Concerned - One thing to do when you can’t draw comics, but have always wanted to write one. This comic is built from posed screenshots from the Half-Life 2 engine. The storyline wraps itself around the storyline of the game quite cleverly, though this does mean many of the jokes are only funny if you’ve played the game.

That’ll do for now.

Posted by Oliver at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)

Using Mac OS X's Cocoa without Objective C

I’m having real problems trying to work out how to interface with the Cocoa runtime on Mac OS X. F-Script, a “lightweight open-source scripting layer” for Cocoa, looks very good and also has a super-useful list of language bridges to the Cocoa runtime. The one I’m looking for, a Haskell-Objective C bridge, is there too. Unfortunately I couldn’t get the examples to work, and the project maintainers seem to have found more interesting things to be doing… which is a shame, as the bridge no longer compiles on Tiger.

Update: Spoke too soon here about HOC - I managed to compile it on 10.3. The trick is to update XCode to 1.5, and then apply a GCC update. Both updates are available from Apple’s Developer website but that requires registration and agreeing to their T & Cs. I’m sure there’s a way to update GCC without going the XCode updating route but I’m not clued in enough to puzzle it out…

Posted by Oliver at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2006

This guy used Quartz Compositor to simulate electronic circuits. Compositor’s GUI is what I find most interesting.

Posted by Oliver at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)

Headdress transforms Mac OS X’s built-in Apache setup into a full-blown virtual server suitable for website development, including PHP support. And all trivially easy to use.

Posted by Oliver at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)