I recntly upgraded my desktop to Debian Wheezy — I like the description of it on the release page, which says Wheezy is currently in a state called testing. That means that things should not break as badly as in unstable or experimental distributions… Heh. Anyhow, it ships with …

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 …

A very quick tip to add to the interwebs because my Google Fu failed to find it the other day when I needed. I wanted to remove the breadcrumbs from a single CMS page — in my case the home page (aka the front page) — in Magento. It’s rather easy to do as it turns out, but I had …

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 …

Since version 13 of Firefox and Iceweasel, it does an annoying thing when you open a new tab. It shows you thumbnails of the sites you’ve visited the most. How very chrome. And how frankly depressing. I don’t want to be reminded, Firefox! Fortunately it isn’t too big a d …

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 …

Here is a small annoyance with an easy solution. The newer versions of Firefox and Iceweasel have added an inspect element tool to the right click context menu. It certainly look very pretty and will be of use for some folks. But its confusing for people like me who use Firebug. You see Firebug …

The last day of my seven languages odyssey has been without doubt the most brain frying of all. I needed to spend about four days of fairly intense study to get close to a viable maze solver. Even now I doubt very much that its anything more than a naïve and buggy implementation. Still, the good …