tl;dr The All Your Base database conference in Oxford was great. I went to it. I recently went along to the fantastic All Your Base database conference which happened in Oxford on 23 November 2012. If you don't get the reference, then you ahould read up on the all your base are belong to us me …

A quick bit of commandline-fu today. And a trick that I always spend ages having to search the web for. Its often the case that you want to find the exact serial number or model or chipset of your motherboard. There is a wonderful command called dmidecode which fetches the DMI data from your mach …

In this mini-series I look at building a minimally functional XML parser; I build one first of all using Haskell’s Parsec library and then in Part Two I use Perl to build an analogous XML parser. I have recently been working my way through the Real World Haskell bo …

Another quick fix for an annoyance I found whilst working my way through the Real World Haskell book. This time it’s in Chapter 16 where we are learning about applicative functors and how to use Parsec in an applicative stylee rather than monadically. As it turns out there have been s …

I am working my way through the Real World Haskell Book at the moment and finding it fun and challenging. In chapter 10 is devoted to parsing PGM files. One of the excersises is to extend the code from the book to deal with ASCII PGM files as well as raw ones. This is how I did it, along with a c …

tl;dr — Microsoft doomed; I don’t care about their new logo; Apple will be our new corporate masters I was reading the Hacker News a couple of weeks back and someone had posted a story from the Seattle Times that said that Microsoft had gained a new logo for the first time since 19 …

I have, of late, been learning Haskell following my experience of it in my Seven Languages In Seven Weeks adventure. Now, I normally learn stuff from books, but browsing through Hacker News a while back, I spotted Rein Henrichs’s new series of Haskell Live tutorials. I decided to follow along …

A lot of video people are hosting on Vimeo these days, it seems well featured reliable and fast, and it doen’t have quite the same psychotically disordered commenting culture as has developed at youtube. However, though there is good stuff to watch on there, not every video uploaded has …

Spam is a constant problem for me as a sys admin. Even after greylisting and denyhosts and fail2banning I still find myself wanting to deny access to the occasional ip address. The netfilter.org project iptables provides a pretty nice firewall for the Linux kernel. I often forget the syntax an …

This is a thing that I’ve wanted to do for ages, and it came up for me during this week'd episode of Hak5, which I am getting to be a big fan of by the way. The material under discussion was what to do when one of your known hosts changes. Darren was saying he was a bit slack and just did a …