Archive for November, 2005

11/29 Warning!

Warning!

Try to ignore what you have learned about conventional, procedural, programming languages, such as Pascal, C, or Fortran. Most of the concepts you learned about conventional programming will impede your learning the principles of programming in a language like Haskell. Haskell follows an entirely different model of computation. Trying to understand Haskell programs in procedural terms is, at this point, a waste of time and effort—confusing, frustrating, and definitely counter-productive. The time for that is when you take a junior- or senior-level course in programming languages. For now, start fresh! Think about new things. You will be dealing with equations and formulas, not those step-by-step recipes that you may have learned about before. You will reason as you would if your were solving problems in algebra. That other stuff is more like telling someone how to do long division.

From Two dozen short lessons [in Haskell].

Short. 290 pages. Sure… Anyway, in for an inch in for a mile, eh?

11/28 Read Dilbert, Mistah Hwang?

Or is Scott Adams watching the news?

11/25 At least it’s colourful

Policy not being applied to reference at this time (private, custom, partial, or location-based assembly bind).
[...]
Post-policy reference: Kiwi.Ads.Ads.Config

Forgot to peel your Kiwi? :-)

11/25 Lubricate The Primate

I posted a GreaseMonkey user script at the root of this site. It suppresses the pesky floating ads, aka SmartAds, that overlay the text of Le Figaro articles. This is my second GreaseMonkey script, the first one was written in order to remove post by a certain annoying guest blogger at Marmot’s, which has since moved here.

Useless for 99% of the people reading me blogs, but here goes :-)

UPDATE
I wrote a new version that seems to work better. Ads show up for less than a second – depending on your machine’s speed – and then, poof! all gone.

11/24 Egg on your face?

  • Stem cell pioneer steps down over egg ethics
    Pioneering stem cell researcher Professor Hwang Woo-Suk has stepped down from his position as Chairman of the World Stem Cell Hub, after it emerged that he used eggs from his own researchers in his work.
  • Hwang Says Eggs Forced on Him
    South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-suk said in a television interview that he tried to talk junior scientists at his lab out of donating their own eggs for research, responding to the latest allegations over ethics violations that have plunged his groundbreaking work into controversy.

Sure. I am very sorry that I have to tell the public words that are too shameful and horrible. Does that mean he’ll hang his chopsticks?