Skip to content

Trying out Haskell and seeing if I learn anything new.

Out for a run this morning, I was listening to the latest episode of the Stack Overflow podcast.  Side note: if you’re interested in a very general discussion of software development, this is a great resource.  It can get a little off topic, but it’s great for listening to while in the car, on the train or out for a run.

Anyway, the question came up of what can a programmer do to make himself better and, specifically, if he’s going to learn a new programming language to achieve that goal, which one should it be?  Joel Spolsky suggested learning Haskell because it’s so different from most other programming languages.  I’m working through Real World Haskell by Bryan O’Sullivan right now, and I’ll post anything interesting I find.

Posted in Technology.

Tagged with .

Comments Off

By bialecki – February 21, 2009

Google’s new Sync is going to be a winner.

The one thing about the cloud that I know is going to be smash hit is syncing data so you can use it anywhere. You can already see this in a whole bunch of applications, the most prominent of which have to be the Google ones. Or at least those are the ones I use.  Anyway, one of issues with syncing data to the web is that data can be big and cumbersome and what if it’s not all there?  This is why I think Google’s Sync is going to be one of the first big winner in the “cloud” space and is going to catch on fast for mobile contacts.

The one thing stopping me from using it right now is that I’m not sure how to get all my contacts from my iPhone into GMail or the Google contact system.  If I knew of a way to do this, I’d have already done it.  I’ll poke around and see if I can figure out to avoid doing it manually.  I’ll post an update if I can figure it out.

UPDATE: With a quick Google search I was able to get my contacts to sync with Address Book, which worked beautifully.  Then this nice utility exports your contacts into a CSV file which can be uploaded to Google.  This is all well and good, but after that it gets messy.  Long story short, Google does a terrible job merging contacts resulting in a lot of duplicates and manually merging them takes a long time — so long I gave up.  It’s too bad, because I would’ve made Google my one stop shop for managing all of this, but for now I’ll let Address Book manage it instead.

Posted in Technology.

Tagged with , , .

Comments Off

By bialecki – February 10, 2009

New Firefox add-on adds reference utility to Firebug.

If you do web development, you know what Firebug is.  If you’re shaking your head no, stop reading, go download this Firefox add-on and don’t ever tell anyone that you didn’t know what this was.  Anyway, a new plugin (FireScope) for Firebug is available that acts as a reference utility so if you need to look up a CSS style and see which browsers support it, you can.  Right now the information it provides isn’t all that impressive — it doesn’t even tell you the possible values for a property without leaving Firebug –, but it’s still useful if you just need to know the syntax or usage of a particular CSS property or HTML tag.

What would be really great is if the site that FireScope points to, http://reference.sitepoint.com/, or really any site that then intergrates with Forebug could become “the” go-to resource for questions about HTML, CSS and JavaScript semantics.  I’m okay with all three technologies, but I still have questions about why something doesn’t work in a particular browser or what are the possible values of something.  This usually means a Google search that provides good results if it’s a simple question and pretty bad results if it’s a hard question (i.e. “Why doesn’t this show up right in IE 6 and how do I work around it?”).

I know the collective knowledge of the internet has answers to a lot of these questions.  Since Firebug has become a standard web development tool, it has gotten a lot of attention and a lot of love from developers.  Hopefully FireScope can begin to push us towards having something similar for reference.  We’ll see.

Posted in Development.

Tagged with , , , , , .

Comments Off

By bialecki – February 8, 2009