plgn

jwz @ 09:28 pm: FUCK YEAH DEBASER


Tags: photography, sf

scearley @ 07:26 pm:

Angela Merkel. Might do the "Paris Hilton Smile" animated gif on this one.

scearley @ 07:09 pm:

( But what's the key for? )

scearley @ 07:06 pm:

Where's the toilet?

scearley @ 07:05 pm:

scearley @ 07:04 pm:
Santa's cleaning up his naughty list.

scearley @ 06:37 pm: Sing along!!!!

scearley @ 06:35 pm: John and David are discussing your porn collection.


Mr Bowie does not approve.

scearley @ 06:14 pm: Everyone's seen the Christopher Walken reading Poker Face vid.

But lest we forget it was done better a decade ago by Peter O'Toole.

scearley @ 06:11 pm:

I may have to go to this, even with the apparent ICP influence.

scearley @ 06:03 pm: Just a few police blotter notes from an Ohio News paper.

A man and woman engaged in fisticuffs Friday afternoon on Hardin Street while the man was removing some of his possessions from the woman's home. He caught her finger on a key ring, breaking it, and she bit him.

A woman in the 1300 block of Fishlock Avenue reported Friday that her daughter has been sending her threatening telephone messages while drunk.

A woman called the police early Saturday morning during an argument with her husband after he claimed that the woman's daughter performed oral sex on him, and the daughter was better at it.

scearley @ 06:02 pm: Three Woolf Moon


We all knew it had to show up at some point.

scearley @ 05:51 pm: Rather than go to Costco for the stuff i needed, I decided to go to Winco. I have no idea why I did that.

All of the fruit was ROCK HARD unripe. Not that I buy fruit at Costco (too much, it goes bad), but damn.

I also forgot mayonnaise trying to get the fuck out of there. There were so many people in that store. I'd never seen the cart area empty.

And assholes with carts? GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY. You don't know what you want? Sure, happens to us all. Or you aren't sure which jam has less sugar. It's all good. But for the love of [deity] don't angle your cart diagonally while you inspect labels.

So now i'm home cooking up a mess of lentils and yellow split peas. I really just heat up some cinnamon ginger, coarse sea salt and tikka masala and then cook the onions until soft, add the peas and lentils, and cook until it's a completely unappetizing looking much. But criminy it tastes so good. I cook it quite often - maybe once a week at least, and it makes enough for dinner lunch and then dinner again.

It's put me in a cooking rut. A tasty rut, sure, a filling rut. But it's still a rut.

jwz @ 03:29 pm: iPhone worm

First iPhone worm discovered

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again

On each installation, the worm - written by a hacker calling themselves "ikex" - changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message: "ikee is never going to give you up".

Tags: computers, mac, phones, pranks

vorotylo @ 10:35 pm: cabal-install haddock documentation - another round of workarounds

Today I've found a way to cabal-install offline documentation – with source hyperlinks! – for a Haskell package.

(The reddit link was quite helpful by pushing me in right direction.)

To obtain documentation without source hyperlinks you just

• run `cabal install' with `--enable-documentation' option ...or
• enable `documentation' parameter in ~/.cabal/config

Then reinstall the package with `cabal install --reinstall' command. Documentation will appear in ~/.cabal/share/doc/PACKAGE-VERSION/html/ directory.

But if you want proper documentation – with `Source' links to the right of declarations – try these commands (replacing `iteratee' with your favourite package):

$ cd /tmp
$ tar -xzf ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/iteratee/0.2.4/iteratee-0.2.4.tar.gz
$ cd iteratee-0.2.4
$ cabal configure
$ cabal haddock --hyperlink-source

## NOTE:
##  * Make sure `documentation' is *disabled* in ~/.cabal/config.
##  * Don't use `--enable-documentation' in `cabal install' command.
## Otherwise links to source code will be omitted from documentation.

$ cabal install --reinstall

That's almost it. But source code pages will not be syntax-highlighted, because hscolour.css is missing. I've used a workaround:

$ cd ~/.cabal/share/doc/iteratee-0.2.4/html/src
$ ln -s /usr/share/doc/ghc6-doc/libraries/Cabal/src/hscolour.css

Now everything is sweet (i.e., documented and hyperlinked to sources).

This post is a reminder to myself, which may possibly help some other haskeller.

SEE ALSO

• Cabal ticket #534: cabal haddock should --hyperlink-source by default
• Cabal ticket #517: make cabal install command support haddock options
  (Opened 8 months ago. Patch available.)
• Debian bug #500924: Should have a system-wide hscolour.css

Tags: cabal, english, haskell

longhairedbum @ 03:38 pm: Violins and Dust, Catholicism and Drag
I am excited about my life. Did you know: I have eaten a three dollar cupcake the past three Fridays. Yes.

Please watch this fucking beautifully shot video of Andrew Bird and St. Vincent being beautiful and making beautiful music.

My literacy tutoring gig begins very shortly; they've assigned me someone. Also I plan on acquiring a violin within the next month and finding a tutor of my own. Did you know: Life in the basement is warm. There are dinners and good music and dancing, even.

Re: Philosophy - The gritty, slow pass through On Interpretation complete. Notational synthesis, then on to Prior Analytics.

I have had so much beer this weekend, you wouldn't even believe. And it's not that lonely-stupor sort of drinking, no, no, it's that hello-I-have-friends-and-family sort of drinking.

It's lovely.

Listen to more Andrew Bird and Kaki King.

jcreed @ 03:06 pm: Have been looking at the literature on Functional Reactive Programming and related things. I am learning that no matter how much I think I've properly digested the whole world of monads and arrows and applicative functors, there's always more to learn.

Generally speaking the programmers' approach to all of these concepts seems very weird to me compared to the logician/category-theorist take, but McBride and Paterson's "Applicative programming with effects" is a really awesome paper that synthesizes the two points of view pretty well for the case of applicative functors. The punchline is that what a Haskell hacker calls applicative functors are what a category theorist calls strong lax monoidal functors. Yes, both strong and lax! Terribly, from a terminological point of view, "lax" means that the functor is weaker than "weak", and "strong" isn't the opposite of "weak" (if anything, "strict" is --- but since "lax" exists as a concept, it's hard to say that "strict" is the opposite of "weak", just that it's, ahem, a stronger condition than "weak") and means that the functor has a "strength".

Ok, everybody sufficiently confused now? Good.

The important thing about these strong but sensitive applicative functors is that they represent a notion of effect that is compatible with product types in one direction, and this very compatibility is a notion of sequencing of effects. Suppose T is an applicative functor. If I have a piece of data of type TA, which is a computation returning type A, and a piece of data of type TB, a computation returning B, then I can make T(A × B) by running the first one and then the second. I can't expect to necessarily do the reverse --- I might reasonably encounter a computation T(A × B) that doesn't naturally decompose into TA and TB. This one-way ticket is the laxness. For a weak monoidal functor would commute up to isomorphism with products, and you'd have T(A × B) isomorphic (with suitable coherence diagrams) to TA × TB, but a lax monoidal functor only goes one way. It needs to be a strong lax monoidal functor for the same reason that the monads in functional programming are always strong monads, to be compatible with our expectations about variable contexts.

But wait, I hear you saying, weren't we told that monads were the ultimate story on a pure functional treatment of effects and sequencing and stuff? Answer: they're one story, yes. The intuitive distinction between monads and applicatives (which the paper above explains rather nicely) is that monads, unlike applicatives, let you use the result of one computation to influence which other computation takes place as the second step. Just look at the Kleisli star's type, it's right there:

TA → (A → TB) → TB

The second argument gets the value of type A before it spits out the final computation. If T were just an applicative functor, the most we could make out of TA and (A → TB) would be TTB. When T is a monad, we have exactly the categorical μ to turn that into TB (this is of course exactly how the Kleisli star is implemented from the categorical data T, η, μ) but when T is merely applicative, TTB is considered a more complicated thingy than TB --- it has two stages of computational dependency, which we're not allowed to erase.

Tags: applicative functors, functional programming, monads

focustest @ 05:37 pm: twisty roads
navigated some narrow twisty lanes, from Houndtor to Manaton past Bowermans Nose. where once there was a gate now is a cattle grid. then took self to Haytor Quarry, wandering along the cattle tracks through, through prickly gorse. the ponds in the quarry rather full, surprised that the large deep working, normally dry, was full of water. too many people around, came home with some gorse. getting to know mitzi cat, quite delightful to be around.

root_fu @ 05:55 am: qotd
"What we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars."
--Mikhail Gorbachev

(ahaha)

jcreed @ 10:35 am: I woke up this morning with the word "huitlacoche" in my head and I had no idea why. I looked it up on wikipedia and it turns out it's a weird-ass black, swollen, infected version of corn that some people consider a delicacy.

I was like why do I even know this word.

Then I remembered! I had seen it years ago on Steve don't eat it!, which is great food writing and you should read it all if you haven't already. The your-mom jokes in the Huitlacoche episode are kinda dumb but I like a lot of the other ones and anyhow I take pleasure in reading about another dude eating really gross things so I don't have to.

Tags: food, web