I first came across binary puzzles in early 2013 after finding a book of them in a Belgian supermarket, not long after I first came across Haskell. And I believe that I've now published the first solver for binary puzzles written in Haskell. And it only took 3 years ;-)The puzzles are a little lik …

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Twitterfeed’s founder, a chap called Mario. In unnecessarily jolly prose, it announced the demise of the service which turned RSS feeds into Tweets and recommended moving to dlvr.it or Buffer. We’re writing to let you know that Twitterfeed wi …

I can’t resist a bargain. Paying 60p for a book with a 1 pound sticker on the front does, I believe, constitute a bargain. The text, dating from 1990 is actually a pretty solid PL introduction and fairly compre …

In recent months, have been slowly working my way through Brian P. Hogan’s 57 Exercises for Programmers in Haskell in my lunch breaks and on bus journeys. You can see the github repo if you’re interested.As I work my way through the exercises, I have been trying to use idiomatic Hask …

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 …

Micropuzzles is a charming book from the early 1980s by a chap called J.J. Clessa. It is a sort of forerunner of Project Euler, containing little puzzles aimed at computer hobbyists who have acquired those newfangled micros and are looking for something challenging to do with their machines.The …

Sometimes solving problems with dumb code involves a simpler expression of a problem than solving the same problem with highfallutin' maths. Sometimes the simpler expression involves more time or space complexity. That might be fine, depending on the inputs we need to process, indeed spending a long …

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 …

New problem this, and it took some google-fu to find out a solution. I recently upgraded Iceweasel (the unbranded Firefox) on my Debian Jessie to the latest beta. I use xmonad as my windowmanager.After the upgrade it was impossible to make HTML5 video go fullscreen. In fact F11 had stopped working …

Living in a shared house can sometimes be troublesome; people have different living habits that can conflict with our own. In my house we recently agreed to start a cleaning rota to make sure that we were all doing our bit. The administrative overhead of a rota can be a pain, so I implemented a v …

This is a little home project that I am working on implementing Scheme in Haskell based on the core provided by Write yourself a Scheme in 24 hours. I have also borrowed from …