Most languages have a nice package management system that helps install new software or libraries—Ruby has the “gem” system, Perl has cpan, etc. In Haskell, it’s “cabal”, and here is how you install it:

darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install
cd cabal-install
sh bootstrap.sh


In addition, you should occasionally use the “update” command to sync your local package listing with the centralized one:

cabal update


To install a remote package, simply use “cabal install “. For example:

cabal install happstack


Also noteworthy is that you can use cabal to install a package from the local directory. For example, if you’ve fetched something using darcs, you could procede to install it like this:

darcs get --lazy http://code.haskell.org/yi/
cd yi
cabal install


Update: To install yi above, I also had to install a package called “alex” which is outside the cabal system at this point. I used MacPorts, i.e. “sudo port install alex”.

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I am deeply touched by the stories of those who have been “disappeared” by the U.S. government over the last 8 years, and hope that what they have to tell us–those who have returned to tell us–can help guide us back to a place of responsibility and strength by example.  I wrote last year to my senator about my Canadian compatriot Maher Arar who was taken from his family during a visit to the US and later tortured in Syria.  Recently, another man who is not Canadian but suffered similarly, Mohamed Bashmilah, has published a short account of his experience.  It begins:

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I just learned about Weka in my bioinformatics class.  We’ll be using it get our computers to “learn” patterns from amino acid sequences in order to predict secondary structures in protein (e.g. alpha helices, beta sheets, etc.).  The cool thing is that this Weka toolbench is suitable for just about anything you can imagine… my mind is already swirling with ideas

There is a Quick Intro here, and a main link to the project where you can download it here.

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I added a few improvements to the Ubiquity “download-files” command. It now checks everything on the page, including frames and iframes. Also, it walks through all of the CSS files and downloads image assets if they match the pattern you specify.

Visit Ubiquity Download Files on GitHub to see the code, or this gist to subscribe.

A handful is five, so I will try to make this a short but helpful list:

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I wrote a ubiquity script that lets you download just about anything on the page you’re visiting, for example images and javascript files.  It’s called “save-all” “download-files” and it’s available as a gist on github.  One of my classes at university has a “resource page” where they provide all of the datasets for our statistics homework; however, you have to click on each one of them (stored in “.dat” format) to get them all!  What a waste of time.  So instead of clicking on each one, I wrote the following script.  Here’s how you would use it:

Update: Changed the name of the command from “save-all” to “download-files”.

Video: Robot uses human mind tricks to navigate 

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There is a fascinating change taking place in categorization due to the internet: we are no longer constrained to say that a book is about one particular thing:

From the page Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags:

It isn’t the ideas in a book that have to be in one place — a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it’s one place, it can’t also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the ‘be in one place’ requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents.  Just thinking out loud here… I wonder if this physical requirement of books being in one place at one time has caused us (humans) to think in categories? Do we naturally think in graphs with nodes and edges? If so, the internet is a nearly perfect medium for this new way of organizing information.

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