Philip Ratzsch: November 2008 Archives

Taking the advice of a full 66% of the comments on the last entry, I had a look at the #haskell IRC channel. I was honestly surprised to see 500+ people signed in. It would be nice, I figured, to have a place to bounce ideas off of people, ask questions, and see what other people are doing.

Since nothing in life is ever easy, of course something went wrong. For whatever reason, whenever I post something, I'm almost immediately disconnected from the server for 'excess flood', whatever that means. I thought it might be something along the lines of "you're spamming the channel", but I wouldn't think one sentence would qualify.

It seems that I've somehow turned IRC into a read-only information source (for me, anyway - other people are chatting away). D'oh.

• FINALLY a language (that I'm aware of) where True !== 1 and False !== 0. I'd have to take off YOUR shoes to count the number of times that's bitten me in the ass. For people who don't know me, I wear sandals so no shoe-taking-offing is ever needed.


• The it primitive is pretty neat and has possibilities:
  

  True || False
  >>True
  it
  >>True
  not it
  >>False
  



• I like the /= representation of !=


• Hmmm...lists are interesting.
  let x = [1,2]
  [1,2]
  0:x
  [0,1,2]
  
  So clearly the : primitive appends elements to the beginning of a list. I thought that perhaps [0,1]:x might produce [[0,1],[1,2]]. It turns out this is not the case, and instead throws an error that essentially amount to a data type mismatch. To achieve the desired result, one must type:
  
  [0,1]:[x]
  
  ...such that both arguments are lists, I assume. Weird.


• putStrLn "Hi"
  Hi
  putStrLn 'Hi'
  
  :1:11:
  lexical error in string/character literal at character 'i'
  
  D'oh. I prefer to use single quotes with my strings. Not a deal breaker though.



Well, as thrilling as I'm sure this has been for you, I'm going to stop and actually get to coding.

So after a full reinstall of Leopard, my Mac seems to be behaving a bit more like it should. I wonder what the odds are of getting a corrupt OS from the factory.

MacPorts seems like a nice idea, and the list of software is decent. My two complaints (what, you thought I wouldn't have any?):

• 1) It's slow as hell. I've been installing Haskell for the last twenty minutes.
• The .dmg-based installer forgets one minor detail, namely changing the $PATH variable. Looking through the instructions for compiling from source, it seems that adding

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

to .profile or .bashrc fixes the issue. I'm sure there's a more elegant approach, but this allowed me to get started on the lengthy process of installing something that would be a single command on Ubuntu.

I was a Mac user long ago. I remember upgrading to OS 7.5, 8.0, and the horrendously error-prone upgrade to OS 9. In the years following that, I went back to Windows. While there were some problems, the nice thing was that the overwhelming majority of things simply worked.

A few years ago I started work linux in various flavors into my work. At first, there were a lot of things to get used to, and I had my fair share of complaints. As I grew accustomed to it however, I grew to love it and a few years ago started using it almost exclusively while keeping a Windows box around for things like Photoshop.

A few months ago, I decided that I was going to try one of the new iMacs. I went out, shopped around, and finally purchased a 24-inch iMac for hardly a paltry sum of money. Within twenty minutes of setting it up and turning it on I had my first complete system freeze, requiring a hard power cycle. This continued while I was having problems connecting to the internet, installing applications, keeping disks mounted, stopping the machine from muting itself, installing MacPorts, and so on.

Not being one to give up on computers easily, I scoured the internet for solutions, read through email lists and talked to people at work. Some problems I was able to fix and I got to a point where the other ones really didn't bother me that much anymore.

Today however was the straw that broke the camel's back. Since 4am this morning my iMac has locked up SIX times and the only thing in any of the logs is a cryptic statement of "KernelEventAgent[23]: tid 00000000 received unknown event GPU" followed by about a hundred lines consisting of hexadecimal codes. While this leads me to believe that there's some problem with the graphics card, one can't effectively Google hundreds of lines of hex and get meaningful results.

I can't reliably do anything that involves an application other than Firefox (speaking of which, Safari is about as useful a web browser as a slice of cold pizza) without the machine completely locking up.

So Apple, you have been officially added to the List Of People And/Or Organizations Who Can Suck My Balls.