InquiryLabs
Politics, Programming and Possibilities
Archive for January, 2009
Ruby 1.9 is here
Author: Duane Johnson30 Jan
The first stable release of Ruby 1.9 is out… I’m downloading it now. There is a nice comparison of Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 here.
The Robotic Revolution
Author: Duane Johnson29 Jan
“One of the benefits is that the workers are always on task. They’re not standing around waiting for something to happen.”
What the Internet is Doing to My Mind
Author: Duane Johnson28 Jan
You know how teachers shifted from teaching rote memorization to teaching concepts sometime during the 19th or 20th century? I think the Internet is causing me to shift in a similar way with regard to facts themselves. I’m not sure if it’s all a good thing, but I just noticed for the first time that instead of thinking about facts, I tend to think about search terms. In other words, my use of memory has been abstracted to a higher level: I don’t recall what I need to know, I recall what will lead me to what I need to know.
Installing HappS
Author: Duane Johnson25 Jan
The premiere Haskell web application stack, HappS, is getting a considerable boost this week. Several Haskell developers are getting together to tidy things up and improve the packaging and documentation. I’m on the documentation team even though I don’t know anything about it. We’ll see if I can add any value 
Anyway, I had a really difficult time installing the “HappS-Tutorial” package and wanted to lay down a few pointers for anyone else who may be having difficulty. After finding, downloading and installing Cabal (Haskell’s package distribution system) on my Mac, I tried to install the HappS-Tutorial package: So, to make a long story short, if you get an error message like this: In case anyone has to go through the dependency hunting process like I did, here is a list of the HappS Tutorial dependencies.
$ cabal install happs-tutorial
Unfortunately, there are some dependency problems in the tutorial as it currently stands but I didn’t find that out until after I had removed the “.cabal” directory in my home directory. Apparently that messed up some dependencies on my own system and caused cabal to think that packages were installed when they weren’t.
Crypto/PBKDF2.hs:20:7:
Could not find module `Data.Binary':
Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.
cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
PBKDF2-0.3 failed during the building phase. The exception was:
exit: ExitFailure 1
You may have to go through the dependencies one by one (using the remarkable hoogle search utility) and manually reinstall packages like this:
$ cabal --reinstall install binary
Where “binary” is the particular package I needed in this case.
Need a Library Book? Have it Scanned… free
Author: Duane Johnson23 Jan
I just found out about openlibrary.org, which has to be the coolest “online library” I’ve seen in a while. Not only do they index millions of actual library books around the world, but they actually have the text of over 1 million of them available online, right now.
OpenID is set to take over the web this year
Author: Duane Johnson22 Jan
Say goodbye to multiple logins… at least, here’s hoping. It looks like the OpenID standard is about to break out this year: last year the number of sites supporting the standard more than doubled from 10k to 30k.
Air Quality in Provo has been Terrible
Author: Duane Johnson22 Jan
I used to think Provo was a healthy place to live (it is, for the most part) but I’ve recently had to update how safe it is to live here. The air quality is absolutely terrible during an inversion, as evidenced by this US air pollution forecast. Basically, we’re the worst in the country right now. Worse than Chicago, NY, even Los Angeles. Yikes!
The Whitehouse has a Blog
Author: Duane Johnson20 Jan
The Real Cause of the Financial Crisis
Author: Duane Johnson14 Jan
This former MIT Blackjack Team member’s perspective is the best synopsis of the underpinnings of the crisis that I’ve read to date. Read the article here.
jQuery 1.3 looks great!
Author: Duane Johnson14 Jan
jQuery is the javascript library that I’ve grown most fond of, especially because of the livequery plugin. Now, with the recent release of jQuery 1.3, it looks like they’ve incorporated livequery into the library itself (using the “.live” and “.die” methods)! Not only that, but the speed improvements look delicious!
