seafood

Blogging research

I loathe the strictures of academic writing. So much so that it affects my ability to get started on a piece of writing. In this sense, I enjoy the openness of blogging. First, I love its "chatty" nature. There is a certain immediacy to publishing on the web that makes...

Successful Strategies for Commenting Code

An excellent discussion on coding style, an often talked about, but poorly formalised art. Read more about it here....

Long lasting, low energy computing

Seeing as humanity is soon to enter a low-energy future it seems a shame to me that computers, in their current state, may well be one of the first things to go. Isn't the whole magic of computing that it allows us to do more with less? Doesn't it help...

latex and xdvi

I just learnt from a colleague about two really cool things. In practice they allow communication from your editor to xdvi and back again. The first thing is that you can send a signal to xdvi (SIGUSR1) that will force it to reload a PDF. You can set up a...

Relative importance of learning vs. teaching

When is the time to publish or speak about something? When is the time to stop and start researching something new? Sometimes I believe that economic or accounting principles should be applied to the very process of knowledge acquisition and disemination. At the moment the process by which people decide...

Emacs essentials

I'll be adding to this entry at times. It's a place to store a grab-bag of useful keyboard shortcuts for emacs. C-h v - describe a variable C-h f - describe a function C-h k - decscribe a key binding With C-h v and C-h f you can press tab...

Bibdesk: a tool for managing BibTeX entries and local copies of papers

I've just downloaded a truly remarkable tool for Mac OS X. I've been looking for a tool like this for ages. It's described rather well on the sourceforge site so I'll begin by quoting that. Later I'll explain exactly which features I've found useful so far. BibDesk is a...

Paper Reading

[01-Feb-2004] Harper and Pfenning. On Equivalence of Canonical Forms in the LF Type Theory [04-Apr-2004] Simon Peyton Jones. Tackling the Awkward Squad: monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls in Haskell [01-Apr-2004] Devil: An IDL for Hardware Programming [19-Apr-2004] Devil Definition [09-May-2004/"] Todd L. Veldhuizen. "Guaranteed Optimization for Domain-Specific Programming."...

Paper Review: Associated Types with Class

I'm starting a new tradition with this entry, that of the paper review. There are two problems I face with my research reading: one, I don't do enough of it and two, I forget a lot of what I read within six months. Writing is two things to me: a...

Lexing and parsing in happy

I've been playing around with happy, the yacc-like parser generator for Haskell. I've learnt something about adding location information to syntactical elements - don't do it in the parser, do it in the lexer. The reason for this is that it's hard to work out when exactly a production is...

GPCE researchers and their work

Here is a collection of interest research being conducted by people I met at GPCE Karl Trygve Kalleberg Karl is interested in traceability of domain-specific knowledge through the transformation process. He also seems to have a system for creating doxygen-like documentation that is retargetable to any language. He is interested...

Installing Epigram

This was simplicity itself. I untarred it and ran make. The only thing I had to do was change the epigram script so that cut -c0-9 became cut -c1-10. Many of the Mac OS X utilities are not standard. I should add that I already had ghc-6.2 and xemacs installed....