I’ve seen this issue mentioned in some random and hard to reach places on the Net, so I thought I’d re-express it here for those who find Google sending them this way. UPDATE: According to the discussion at https://trac.macports.org/ticket/27237, the real problem here is not fully dynamic string, but the use of _GLIBCXXDEBUG. So I recommend ignoring what follows, as it will help you on Snow Leopard or Lion with gcc 4.6 and above. [...]

I’ve been managing my Ledger project with Git for some time now, and I’ve finally settled into a comfortable groove concerning branches and where to commit stuff. [...]

Back in late 2007, Paul Graham put up an essay titled “How to Do Philosophy”, in which Mr. Graham hoped to elucidate where Philosophy went wrong and why the field, as now practiced, must be renovated to remain useful. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that much of philosophy has no benefit whatsoever: The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics does anything differently as a result. If I may, as a student of philosophy, I would like to offer my response to this argument, whose tenets have been repeated many times throughout Philosophy’s history. [...]

Another thing to be learned down the Haskell rabbit-hole: Thinking in infinites. Today someone posed a puzzle which I tried to solve in a straight-forward, recursive manner: Building a list of primes. The requested algorithm was plain enough: Create a list of primes “as you go”, considering a number prime if it can’t be divided by any number already considered prime. However, although my straightforward solution worked on discrete ranges, it couldn’t yield a single prime when called on an infinite range – something I’m completely unused to from other languages, except for some experience with the SERIES library in Common Lisp. [...]

Haskell may be difficult to start out with, but once things start rolling, they roll fast. Yesterday (real world time, these blog entries are staggered) I had started the first lines of HackPorts, but now things are getting close to done for the first version. It’s not that I’ve written much code, but that it was simple to integrate with other people’s code. [...]

As I explore Haskell, I’m discovering that one of its trickiest aspects is not structuring things functionally, but the lazy evaluation. It turns out lazy evaluation comes with both great benefits, and significant difficulties. I’d like to point a few of these out, as they’re becoming clearer to me. [...]