shimweasel

looks like our host isn't massively happy about long-lived memory-hogging processes like predictive. guess I should probably cut down the size of the processed corpus. Should be apples now though.

i feel so web 2.0-ish. Everything's up and running on the new VPS, which should mean Chris should be bitching slightly less often, or at least on more varied topics. anyway. I've been working on predictive lately. Mostly data structure hacking - it's an interesting exception to Knuth's law, in that for every byte I can squeeze out of the runtime footprint, I can shovel more data in and get better results. I gave a little talk about it at FP-Syd, and the slides are up here. work continues on it: I want to get an iPhone version working, which probably means a rewrite in C. Also doing some hacking on libcmph, which is almost exactly what I want, except that it appears to fail about 0.01% of the time, which is good enough for government work but massively frustrating in this context.

 am back working on my own projects, which does feel damn good. I miss the social life of optus most, weirdly - I'll have to make sure I don't slip back into creepy hermit mode.

 also about to move the blog and my online projects over to a new hosting provider, so if you don't hear from me I'm either lost at the bottom of a dark digital well, or as permanently hopeless about updating this thing as I usually am.

 

 

 

Thanks to the hackers at http://www.modrails.com/, the blog should be ever so slightly less crashy now. Hurrah!

 In other news: still at Optus, working on the InSing portal, enjoying Christmas, not seeing enough shows.

 Still hacking a lot of perl and Haskell - my copy of Real World Haskell is already pretty well thumbed.

"If you have a good enough architecture, it doesn't matter whether your programmers are any good."

 not sure I can actually add anything to that.

well, that was surprisingly painless. now running on Ubuntu 8.04, and nothing seems to be significantly broken. Rock on. Now, for some git repos…

I've just bought myself a spanking new ergonomic keyboard, but to my horror, the control key is way down the bottom of the screen.

"This is normal!" you say. Yes, but I use emacs, and it's far too far to reach every second keystroke. I like it where the caps lock usually is, and given that the caps lock is of no earthly use to anyone, it's usually easily swapped in using Keyboard Preferences on the Mac. Too easy!

 Unfortunately, as you can see, the typematrix has sensibly done away with the caps lock, replacing it with a shift key the size of tasmania.

 

Don't get me wrong, gentle reader: I love that key. I salivate over it, entertaining lewd thoughts entirely inappropriate to this family (and frankly dusty) blog. However, I want it for my own filthy purposes: to wit, as a big old Control key. Shift can be demoted to the old control key, which is close-as-dammit to its normal position, and all will be well with the universe.

 But oh no! normal keyboard preferences will neither let you remap shift to something else, or remap anything else to shift! How can we fix this? Googling gave me DoubleCommand, which will let you change a few mappings in a distinctly non-orthogonal, non-extensible sort of way, and Ukulele, while an admirable piece of software for changing the mapping of regular keys, has absolutely no truck with modifier key. It looks like we are sunk! But hold! a ray of light on the horizon: an article on mapping other keys to shift using Interface Builder. This solves half of the problem, allowing me to map the piddly little control key to shift. It doesn't give me all of it, unfortunately. The approach can be extended, though: just copy one of the dropdown selectors and change the tag to '1', just like we did for the list of tags. One last little bit: we have to control-click on the new dropdown, select 'modifierMappingDidChange', and drag it to the "File's Owner" object. 

and there it is.

 

 it's so beautiful I could cry. But instead, I'm going to bed, knowing that just an hour's hacking has saved me milliseconds. Awesome.

I just defined an emacs macro for the first time.

1. it's really, really easy
2. it's really, really useful
3. i'm sort of embarrassed i hadn't done it before.

Still, onwards and upwards, right?

for LWP::UserAgent, giving field-value pairs to 'post' sends them in the request. Giving them to 'get' sets them in the header, which is less than useful. *sigh*

 

anyway, hi. I've moved again since i last posted - back to Gordon this time. Am now working for Optus on a web hacking contract, which is keeping me off the streets and adequately stressed. Oh, and google dev day yesterday. Mad fun, even if Android's not quite as open (or GWT quite as un-java-y) as i'd like…

ok, so that was embarrassing. 11:24 on NYE, and I'm still at home because I got interested in something off projecteuler.net. wonder if anyone's still around…