Update and CSS beauty

Get Tiger look for your WordPress blog today. It brings an updated look to the once-fresh WordPress backend.

It is a plugin which adds a style-sheet that overrides the default one. It makes the admin area look like a Mac app, and if you like those, this will be a treat.

And while you’re at it: get the latest (1.5.2) version of WordPress. A few fixes in there you would not want to miss, one of them being a little bug with XML-RPC blog-posting – postings never showed up on the site, but sat dead in the database. What is XML-RPC? It is a way to let other websites use yours – like me sending Jeppe’s portrait of me from Flickr to here using their forms. (I had trusted them with write permissions on the blog first. That was back before Flickr was bought by Yahoo, I think. But, I’d trust them anyway: these things are too much fun not to.)

I just learned that this standard, like RSS, once started in Dave Winer‘s mind. Who’s Dave Winer? Let’s just say he was an important man in making a few web standards.

My American experience

In conversation (via Skype) with Peter I told him I had been in the US once. Rode from Chicago to Duluth, MN in a Greyhound:

> [17:52:50] Peter Rukavina skriver: You realize that the fact that your entire experience of North America consists of Duluth and riding to Duluth on a bus is worthy of an indepedent film. Or at least a blog post.

He went on to show me a Google Map with directions from: Duluth, MN to: Charlottetown, PEI. That last place is in east Canada, folks. And he said something kind about inviting me to come and see North America:

> Consider this an official invitation from North America to come and visit parts other than Duluth.

I do have some cultural understanding of the North American phenomenon: music historian Peter Guralnick‘s writing and rock regent Elvis Presley‘s recorded performances. And I once read half of the Constitution. And recently I have followed some Canadian goings-on. But going there and bearing witness in the first person, that would be something else.

I guess I would have to go with a goal, like changing a person, or kissing a patch of ground, or seeing a museum. Or, going to a conference, like Peter’s Zap your PRAM in 2003.

Update: My “North American” outside of “U.S.A.” experience is thus nil. As a teenager I saw a TV show “about teenagers with problems”. It was about Canada. That much I could make out, but not much else. It had a surly grunge guy in flannel and leather jacket with… long-hair-type issues. It was a small-town 90210 without the money. (OK, I give up, I remember nothing about this stuff.) Swedes: Do you recognize this? What was the title?

Jeppe: new at Flickr




olleolleolle

Originally uploaded by Jeppe Norsker.

After being a Flickr user for 1 minute, Jeppe decided to portray yours truly, and this is the first portrait (of many?) from our shared office.

We still worship its clean white cube style, but we are ready to give this up when the furnishings arrive.

Promises of sun-screening material ring like music in our ears.

What is an Arcade game?

Someone asked me today what an arcade game was. It was a first meeting with a man at my new office-space.

I launched into a historical diachronical account of how the arcade came into being, what its social implications were, how the *flaneur* was created by this architectural/business phenomenon. Then how light entertainment was added to this mix. I touched upon how the concept came into being, its cultural genesis, its roots.

I flowed. I was wordy.

Coulda just emailed him a link to: Arcade game at Wikipedia.

But that would’ve introduced someone else to my new workplace.

My new workplace? Oh, it is just a new address. I am renting space at Bocca, with Jeppe. Jeppe is a brave soul who has his portrait on his website. One day I shall join those few.

Most often you can see where I am using Plazes’s Where Is Olle, which brings up a Google Map of the place.

Programming in Haskell

After last Sunday’s start of a Programmers’ Salon, I have not thought more about Olav’s glowing words on how the Haskell programming language does interactive input.

The problem can be formulated thusly: Haskell is a side-effect-less language, a purely functional language. How can it take interactive input?

We wallow in side-effects in the imperative languages, it’s what we do.

The answer lies in monads. They are “used to express sequential composition”. Sequence! Haskell has none! I was flabbergasted when the implications hit me. And they keep hitting me. (Reading a Monads tutorial for mortals could help, but relating this feeling of being so close to so much power seems like a good idea right now.)

The book Programming in Haskell has a few rather informative and thought-provoking Powerpoint slides up.

I got a lot of mileage out of Tour of the Haskell syntax, too. (Via the tag “Haskell” on del.icio.us.)

The code that looks like this might scare you off, but the Ruby crowd gets a leg up on the rest of you: this reeks of Ruby’s blocks.

[ (x, y) | x < - [1..3], y <- "abc" ]

The tuple (x,y) is going to be filled with successive integers and characters. The end result is a list of tuples like this:

[(1,'a'),(1,'b'),(1,'c'),(2,'a'),(2,'b'),(2,'c'),(3,'a'),(3,'b'),(3,'c')]

To do that thing, Ruby uses the class SyncEnumerator of its standard library Generator to increment two variables at a time. See its doc, beautifully generated by RDoc.

> require ‘generator’

> s = SyncEnumerator.new([1,2,3], [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’])

> # Yields [1, ‘a’], [2, ‘b’], and [3,’c’]
> s.each { |row| puts row.join(‘, ‘) }

I can see now that Ruby is always more legible. Its pragmatism stands out more when I look at “pure” languages. Emotionally, I like it like that. But, really, there is power in these super-abstract modes of thought.

And where are the Ruby limericks?

More Ruby: Did some RDoc

In the area of learning more Ruby and teaching others about its greatness, I did some uncovering yesterday:

Shortly: RDoc is amazing.

The :include: _somefile_ statement is a powerful way of keeping your README and your code rather separate. If that is what you want, then you can put the long, descriptive story about your code in a separate file, and use the interspersed API docs comments for documenting the parts of it.

(This post was written at the 43Things.com website, and sent to the Morningstar blog using some XMLRPC. If it works, it is quite fancy.)

See more progress on: Learn Ruby

Olle Jonsson on 43 Things

Olle Jonsson on 43 Things is a little page on me, and what my goals are in life.

Or, at least as much as I typed in.

43things.com is a social networking site with the social object of personal goals.

A very interesting, and stimulating feature was its tie-ins with my blog platform WordPress and Flickr. My latest public Flickr pictures are displayed in my 43things profile as well. Reuse!