jlouiss blog

Some torrent files contain a humongous amount of files. Thousands. This is one of the problems you have to cope with as a client-writer and I plan to take care of both etorrent and combinatorrent. However, the solution I've adopted for etorrent is sinisterly beautiful, so I decided to write it down.
The ProblemOpen files are limited on UNIX systems.

In the first part, we set up the scene for combinator parsing. We introduced a small toy language and an interpreter for it. The thing we left out was the meat of the problem. Namely how to parse an expression string into a Standard ML datatype value.

Suppose you have two functions:
(* Type: int * int -> int *)
fun f (x,y) = x + y

(* Type: int -> int -> int *)
fun g x y = x + y
These functions do the same thing, namely add two numbers 'x' and 'y'. They have different types however, and they are called in different ways. 'f' is the usual way in most languages. We take a pair, and return the result.

Let there be no doubt, that I like to use PostgreSQL as my main database of choice. I like my databases to use SQL, a declarative language, for my operations and queries. I guess the reason for this is my strong knowledge and experience with functional languages in general. The path from functional programming to SQL is rather short.
This is a list, in no particular order, why I love PostgreSQL.

The single most important role in a software project, be it Open or closed source is the role of the gatekeeper. This person, or group of persons oversees the general progression and development of code in the project.

The ExSML project is a fork of Moscow ML which aims to replace the current MosML runtime with one based on LLVM. In Moscow ML the following things happen when you compile a file of SML source code:

First the file is lexed and parsed into an abstract syntax tree. Then elaboration happens. In the elaboration phase we resolve, through type inference, the types of all expressions.

Lately, we saw the emerging trend that newspapers are beginning to die. Good riddance. I've never bought a newspaper, I will never buy a newspaper, and I am pretty sure people younger than my age won't as well. The market is gone, so how are newspapers going to survive?

Currently, they have placed their hope in advertising.

People are talking about the RailsConf keynote "What killed Smalltalk?" by Robert Martin. You can watch the keynote talk at blip.tv.

The premise

As soon as a movie/episode is out in the wild on the internet it is
going to be spread like a wildfire. To circumvent this, the
movie/series industry have to change their stance towards copyright
protection. The best they can hope for is to slow down the spreading,
because it is technically impossible to stop.

The Moscow ML LLVM project is having a blast these days. First, we got
autotools into the project, so everything is now built from
autotools. Then we eliminated a lot of magic in the
code base. Importantly, you can now reorder C functions without fear of
the run-time breaking down and getting out of sync with the compiler.