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The pipeline operator
One of the cool things about the Elixir language is that you can string functions together from left to right using the so-called pipeline operator |>. I was thinking about it this morning after reading this comment from taylorfausak on reddit. Why flip everything around like that? Write expr …
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Why sum and product types?
When reasoning about functional types it sometimes helps to take a step away from the compiler and delvelop some informal intuitions about why things work the way that they do.When I read about algebraic data types they seemed rather complex notions. Algebraic data types, I discovered from wikiped …
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Video: Guy Steele’s Growing a Language Talk
I recently chanced across a truly wonderful talk by Guy Steele, one of the creators of the Scheme programming language. He gave the talk at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference, but it touches on some timeless themes in communicating with computers.The talk focusses on the need for us to build languages …
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Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks: Introduction
Back in 2011, I took up the challenge of learning Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. The book is Bruce Tate’s tour through seven of the most interesting languages about.I learned about concurrency models, functional programming and the unique qualities of Ruby, Io, Erlang, Scala, Prolog, Co …
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Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks
Back in 2011, I took up the challenge of learning Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. The book is Bruce Tate’s tour through seven of the most interesting languages about. I eventually finished working my way through the exercises and blogging about it in early 2012, almost a year after starting. …
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How to make an adblocker with BIND and Apache on Debian
There are a few approaches to blocking ads. Adblock Plus seems to have become the most popular. It uses Firefox’s content policies interface and you can read more about how Adblock plus works on the FAQ.I have been playing around this week with another approach to Ad blocking, which is do …
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Lunchtime hack: Google spellchecker on the commandline onliner
I was just talking to my colleague Pete about how useful Google’s Did you mean? feature is as a spell checker. It comes up with much better suggestions than other systems. So here is a quick lunchtime hack that uses the little-known Lynx browser -dump command and some Perl to make a comma …
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Programming with our communal exocoretex
There was recently a cartoon on xkcd that dealt with ineffective sorts. In the title tag it proposed the stacksort — a sort that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns a sorted array. Gregory Koberger liked the idea so much that he implemented stacksort. …
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Xmonad made me more productive
I have been using Xmonad as my main window manager for several months now. I wrote about my initial experiences with the Haskell tiling window manager a while back. I want to talk briefly about how I have found myself more productive since making the leap from Gnome in this quick addendum to the …
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SOLVED Nautilus is slow when browsing a Windows/Samba network
I recently hit an exciting and hard to solve problem at work, or at least my colleague and co-web wrangler did. You see at New Internationalist our office network is a mix of *nix, windows and mac machines. We use various Samba servers to host all our documents. So its pretty important to browse …
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crab2mail: Get Your Crabgrass Inbox In Your Email Inbox
One of the gotchas with Riseup.net’s crabgrass install is that it is very much a pull technology. You have to remember to check your Crabgrass. I am forgetful sometimes. So I made a script called crab2mail to pull your crabgrass inbox into your email …
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Muffet: A Perl Web Spider
Muffet is a web spider written in Perl and Moose that I've put up on github, under GPL.
The problem that I was trying to solve was to spider …
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TwitterHaiku -- A Thing for making haiku from Twitter searches
TwitterHaiku lets you find a haiku-like tweet. That is to say that it finds 17 syllable tweets from the Twitter search API …
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Making Sendmail use a relay even when not running the Sendmail daemon
This turned out to be a three pipe problem; all I wanted to do was not to run OpenBSD's send mail daemon, yet still be able to send mail from that box. It turns out that there's a simple answer in the post Improving Sendmail Securi …
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charlie's RSS feed
Well, after a couple of hours faffing with perl I've got a valid looking RSS feed. This will let you stay in touch with what I'm ranting, writing and coding using a 'news reader' program or device. Or e …
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