How to replace procrastination by a list of parsing techniques

Here's a very nice Wadler's paper with quite simple ideas to get you through a way of parsing which I guess predates monads, and monadic parser combinators.

How to replace failure by a list of successes.

Seeing it after playing with SMUG (Common Lisp Monadic parser combinator lib), watching MJD's Higher Order Parsing techniques with perl, and re-reading his parsing chapter definitely helped a lot to make all that fuzzy knowledge settle a bit.

Unfortunatelly, I'm not using any parsing technique very often, but I like to read about all those crazy parsing techniques. (See META: Pragmatic parsing in Common Lisp for another one (inspired by Val Schorre's no-words-to-describe-how-enlightening-is-it META-II)).

Joining the monad party

Ok, so I won't try to explain what is a monad, or where is it used, mainly because I'm not sure I know the answers to these questions, but I'm just going to list some links that seemed to make sense (more or less) at some point. I think 'programmable semicolons' is a very nice way to put it.

- http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/baastad.pdf
- http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monads-and.html
- https://codon.com/refactoring-ruby-with-monads
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28139259/why-do-we-need-monads
- https://www.stephanboyer.com/post/9/monads-part-1-a-design-pattern
- http://blog.reverberate.org/2015/08/monads-demystified.html
- https://www.schoolofhaskell.com/school/advanced-haskell/functors-applicative-functors-and-monads
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/44965/what-is-a-monad

Monads in CL/scheme
- https://www.lrde.epita.fr/dload/papers/newton.16.monad.report.pdf
- http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lisp-snippets/tree/monads.lisp
- https://common-lisp.net/project/cl-monad-macros/monad-macros.htm
- http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dherman/browse/shared/notes/monads/monads-for-schemers.txt

Monads in Clojure
- https://github.com/clojure/algo.monads

Others
- http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/rop/
- https://www.schoolofhaskell.com/school/advanced-haskell/functors-applicative-functors-and-monads
- http://www.valuedlessons.com/2008/01/monads-in-python-with-nice-syntax.html

Seem cool, but couldn't grasp it:
- http://www.eliza.ch/doc/wadler92essence_of_FP.pdf
- https://ncatlab.org/nlab/files/WadlerMonads.pdf

Meta, why there are sooo many monad tutorials:
- https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/

Alan Kay interviews and more ideas

Recently, Alan Kay (you know, my 1st reference for maaany things) appeared in Code Mesh and Joe Armstrong (of Erlang fame) interviewed him. As always, lots of insights and some old concepts mixed with new ones. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY . HN discussion here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13033299

Also here is a 2h+ long interview from 1990 that I think appeared recently on the internet.
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D9DC82D997454711A71B586E17D23119

More 'Kayisms', some thoughts, reflections and examples on how to store data that can last (as in be read) practically forever.
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf . (related to http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ )


And here there are a couple of other links I hadn't seen about him, the story of personal computing, and progress/critical thinking  in general.

• http://factordaily.com/alan-kay-apple-steve-jobs/
• http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/
• http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf
• http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

Install Wifislax 4.12

Putting wifislax in a usb stick is a bit unlike most other distros.

1.  copy it with dd, or unetbootin. 
2. run ./boot/Linux_Wifislax_Boot_Installer.com
3. when it fails with "error while loading shared libraries: libdevmapper.so.1.02: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory".
4. ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdevmapper.so.1.02.1 /usr/lib/libdevmapper.so.1.02
5. rerun  ./boot/Linux_Wifislax_Boot_Installer.com 
6. Audit!

TIL: Oneliner http endpoint

Today I was looking for some 'Taco Bell' way to create an http endpoint in a server that would output very basic stats about the server.

In this stackoverflow thread I found a pretty neat way to do it.

 while true ; do nc -l -p 1500 -c 'echo -e "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n $(lsof -a -p $(pgrep myprocname) | wc -l)"'; done

Nice, eh?

TIL: highlight jira's comments

At (sys:getenv "WORK") we use JIRA as an issue tracker.  An issue tracker you can hate as much as any other issue tracker (maybe even a bit more).

The problem at hand today is that I can't see the highlighting of the focused element in jira in my screen (depending on the lights and reflection), and in long threads, it makes impossible to see what is the comment that I'm supposed to be looking at.

The tip for today is to overwrite css for some sites.  In conkeror we could add the configs in .conkerorrc but it seems firefox (keysnail for that matter) makes us use a userContent.css which belongs to a profile.

For me, I had to edit the file "/home/rgrau/.mozilla/firefox/c32dsif..default/chrome/userContent.css"

and add this:

@-moz-document domain(jira.myserver.com) {
    .focused { border: solid 1px !important; }
    /* .focused { background-color: red !important; } */
}

Flickering thinkpad x220 screen

My thinkpad's screen start flickering one month ago. It was just a column 1/4th of the width (maybe 1/6th, can't remember now).

I was horrified by the fact that I may have to buy another laptop, but fortunately, it was a matter of 100euros for the  LCD.

Watch this for a nice guide on how to change the LCD without messing with unnecessary parts. And enjoy a really nice soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RwO6ZlyzGA .

So, and today I read in /r/emacs that the CTO of Opera software is a heavy user of emacs, and owns an X220. That's what he says about X220.