Bill Farmer

Random thoughts on random subjects

Haskell

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

I read an article recently about how amazingly efficient functional programming, and Haskell in particular is. So I thought I’s give it a go and see how I got on. You can try it out in your browser: http://tryhaskell.org λ let factorial n = product [1..n] in factorial 99 9332621544394415268169923885626670049071596826438162146859 2963895217599993229915608941463976156518286253697920827223 7582511852109168640000000000000000000000 :: (Enum a, Num a) => a λ Pretty impressive! So I thought I’d try a simple web application.

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SlimStat

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

When I first set up this web site, I looked for a simple web analytics program so that I could see if anyone actually looked at it. After faffing about with a couple of well known open source packages, I decided that they were way over the top by several orders of magnitude. Then I found SlimStat. However it appears to be no longer actively maintained, which it why the previous link is via the Way Back Machine.

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Raspberry Pi Wifi

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

When I got my Pi some months ago I bought a wifi adapter for it, as you do. But I couldn’t get it to work reliably in Raspbian, and I didn’t even try in Arch Linux. So I tested the adapter on my windoze box, and it worked just fine, and I tried it with Linux and it worked just fine, so I put it in the ‘too hard’ box.

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Python

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

I’ve studiously avoided Python up till now, even though it appears to be fairly popular, because it violates the first law of compiler design: ‘Blank space shalt not be significant except to separate tokens where necessary.’. That’s why you can minimise a lengthy JavaScript script like jQuery to one enormously long line and it still works just fine. But, she-who-shall-be-ignored (self categorisation) decided she wanted to enter an advent calender competition which involved checking a web page to see if your name has come up and sending an email if it does.

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Whatever-o-meter

by Bill Farmer. Categories: Hacking .

Introduction Whatever-o-meter is a WordPress and Hugo plugin that shows a tachometer-like dial with a pointer, asks a series of predefined questions which are answered by moving a slider, shows one of several predefined results, and moves the tacho pointer to a position determined by the value of the result. The project is on Github. Documentation Whatever-o-meter uses the shortcode [whatever-o-meter] or {{<whatever-o-meter>}} to insert the whatever-o-meter display into the page.

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