We have a couple of low-cost airlines in England and Ireland, Easyjet and Ryanair. They are interesting because they optimise for low turn-around time and general cheapness. Optimisations include making the passengers walk to the aeroplane then up both sets of on-board steps to halve loading time, and putting quite a steep charge on all […]
I'm back in Dublin, trying madly to lose the Californian mannerisms. Starting sentences with 'So …' is the most pernicious. It’s excellent to be back; there’s a great sense of camaraderie here, and people are easier to approach. It’s also good to have easy access to daylight — even though there’s less of it, I […]
I was on a friend’s machine looking to copy some of his software.
$ dpkg-repack <pkg>
bash: dpkg-repack: command not found
So, here’s a hacky and woefully incomplete replacement for dpkg-repack.
#! /bin/sh
set -eu
[ 0 != $(id -u) ] && { echo "Must be run as (fake)root" 1>&2; exit 1; }
pkg=$1; pkgdir=$(mktemp -d "$pkg.XXXXXX")
mkdir "$pkgdir"
dpkg -L $pkg | tar […]
Independently from my decision to revisit Haskell, some colleagues here have just started a discussion group to learn the language. I hope I'll have time: I enjoyed my brief dalliance with it in 2003.
One of my Dublin colleagues has a copy of Thompson’s book, Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming so I'll steal that when […]
Some wonderful person (I can't believe it was me) made me a .initrc file for my work home directory. It contained one line:
set mark-directories off
I wouldn't press you to go out and copy me, for its effect is to stop tab-completion from putting the trailing / onto a completed directory name, so you have to […]
I've taken to using the overflow car park at work, which is so large it can be seen from space!. It also happens to be a whole two minute walk from the office. "What has this to do with the price of Peruvian cheese?!", I hear you cry. Well, as it happens, we have a […]
I occasionally like to pretend that I write in Scheme. It’s a language I very much admire. However, I tried the other day to write a reduce function in Scheme and was surprised and annoyed that certain language features were missing. I really miss pattern matching and partial application whenever I write Scheme. Maybe I […]
This posting is mostly a retrospective on my time in Mountain View and how it compares with the UK.
Firstly, America is a great shock to the old-world me. The stunning regularity of the grid system, even in small "cities" such as Mountain View. Not that Mountain View is actually a real city. It has virtually […]