Blog

My blog about linguistics, computing, politics and whatever else passes through my head

Laziness And Exceptions = Confusion (2011-02-26)

As part of the rewrite of my Haskell sound change applier, I’ve been creating custom exceptions in Haskell. Admittedly, this way of doing this is discouraged in Haskell, but for some cases it seems like the best approach to me. Namely, the AST may have been transformed in a ...

Type Anxiety (2011-02-19)

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been reworking some of my sound change applier to try to unify the 3 different ASTs which evolved as I developed the current code base. And in the process, I’ve been experiencing a measure of what I’m going to ...

The Problem Is Energy (2011-02-13)

I was reading this blog article on the BBC when the question of resources and perpetual growth came up. The argument is that almost all economists (and the general population) assume that it is natural and desirable that the economy grows by 2% – 3% forever, but that this assumption cannot ...

Intsets Are Faster Than Lists (2011-01-27)

I’m currently thinking about tidying up some of the data structures in my sound change applier. Basically, there are three major data structures currently:

A type to contain the results of the initial surface parse
A type to contain the AST after some simplification and transformations into more efficient ...

Flash Finally Works (2011-01-26)

Ever since I installed 64-bit Fedora on this laptop, I’ve been having some issues with Flash. For a lot of Flash videos, the sound contains a rhymic beeping or corruption that made it difficult to listen to. I tried googling the problem several times, but although there were solutions ...

Cats And Cat Owners (2010-10-16)

If there’s one thing that winds me up regularly, it’s the way cats are treated in this country of ours. And by that I don’t mean that cats are abused – I mean that people buy them then believe it’s perfectly reasonable to let them do whatever ...

Fun With Haskell (2010-10-04)

I thought I should follow up on my previous posts, since in at least two previous posts I’ve criticised aspects of the Haskell experience. In general, I point out ways things can be improved or are sub-optimal a lot more than I praise them, but I don’t want ...

The Problem With Haskell Typeclasses (2010-09-13)

As anyone reading might know, I’ve recently been experimenting more with Haskell, which is a strongly (and statically) typed language. Haskell uses a feature called type classes to allow polymorphic functions, where a type class is essentially a list of functions that can be implemented in a type specific ...

Regular Expressions For Non-Text (2010-07-30)

In the last few days, I’ve returned to a long running annoyance of mine. And it’s this: why does there seem to be a complete absence of libraries that provide the power of regular expressions for non-text? The way I see it, regular expressions have the following key ...

Searching The Free Internet (2010-07-22)

Yet again, I’m wishing that Google had an option to filter out any sites which charge for access. A lot of my interests are academic, and when I search for information a lot of the results tend to be links to pay-per-view journals or other non-free websites. And this ...