Hobby-hacking Eric

2006-07-12

tailor needs a recent CVS

Having trouble bootstrapping from CVS (say, via anonymous pserver on sourceforge)? Try upgrading. It wasn't working for me with cvs 1.10, but 1.11 did the trick.


2006-07-09

haskell wikibook moves forward

Ran into dmhouse on #haskell today. One bit of conversation led into another, and before I knew it I was rewriting the entirety of the basic concepts (now called Variables and functions) chapter. I hope it doesn't suck too badly, but I guess I'm not too worried, since the community can always come in and clean up after me later. Also completed the Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours import. It was easy, thanks to the Perl module HTML::WikiConverter.


2006-07-07

ssh issue hacking

Revisited one of old demons last nights : poor sleeping habits. Up to end of June, I had managed to make a completely artificial transformation of myself into a morning person, sort of as a neccessity in becoming more effective at work. But last night, I started hacking on SSH issues and ended up doing what the French call a white night... pulling an all-nighter, that is. You know how it goes. You start working on one issue, and actually that itself doesn't take that much time (in this case, a fix for CM-related stuff), but then in the process of testing your stuff you notice other problems (like, me trying to run test this on Putty with my Mac) and so you start hacking on that, and your stupid tenacity makes it so that you don't give up until the very end. Of course, by the end of the night, I was being really really slow, even watching the Corporation on the my computer while waiting for darcs to recompile for the umpthinged time (which of course slowed down the compilation and also made the viewing very choppy and unpleasant).

In my more disciplined days, I would have been smart enough to have told myself that anything I can do at night, I could also do after waking up, and much more efficiently at that (you know, without the fatigue-induced stupidity). Instead of staying up to do darcs hacking, going to bed at 09:00 and then going to work at 15:00, I could have just gone to bed, gotten up early, done my darcs hacking, and still gone to work late, only probably not nearly as late as before. Silly me. I will get back in gear. This was the thing I was afraid of. You take one little holiday and all your (completely artificial) sleep schedule goes all out of whack. Need to get my discipline back and remember that until the end of next year, everything I do needs to be secondary to the thesis.

Anyway, hope my sleep-derived patches actually work as expected, and aren't chuck full of stupidity. Learned a bit about Unix in the process, like what /dev/tty does.