Welcome to the tobold.org website. This is the personal website of Toby Goodwin, aka #t
You might well be looking for pacc, or rc or possibly even bun or one of my other coding projects.
I have some Haskell tutorials, some Usenet articles, and various other odds and ends of writing.
“Blog” is not an elegant word. So here's my journal, and here's the feed.
The following aphorism just occurred to me; Google suggests it might even be original. Read More...
Having made my living by fixing computer software problems, I find it incredible that we used to do this without being able to “google the error message”. So often, that quickly leads to just the solution needed, which allows me to get on with something more interesting. But not always... Read More...
I'm disappointed by today's Google doodle. A marvellous idea, of course, to commemorate the centenary of Turing's birth with a model of a Turing machine. And as you'd expect, it looks good. The font used on the tape has a nice 1930s feel. But it is a triumph of form over content. Read More...
I've just given up smoking (again). I'm just past three weeks now. A friend (another recidivist smoker) asked: how did you manage it? Read More...
I'm implementing a bookselling website in yesod. Most of the action involves two tables in the backend database. The Book table holds information about a book such as author, title, ISBN, while the Stock table holds instances of books that we have owned. Naturally they are in a one-many relationship. Read More...
I finally got around to making Atom and RSS feeds working. Huge thanks are due to pbrisbin, first for his work on yesod-newsfeed (in which the ubiquitous Michael Snoyman also seems to have had a hand). Secondly, for publishing the code to his own (very cool) site on github. Read More...
Just found Running ghc on low-memory computers, which has made my life slightly more pleasant. I'm running yesod on a 64-bit vm with only 1GB memory. And for hysterical raisins, a mere 0.5G swap till a week ago. This combination causes Linux to kill random important system daemons before crashing (rant about this disaster will follow when I've written it). Then I donated part of my file system to make it 2.5G swap. (Repartitioning is on the todo list.) Read More...
So I've been thinking about how (and whether) to support comments on this blog. Read More...
I lost the Drupal version of this site during a VPS move. Careless, I know, but also an indication of one of the troubles with Content Management Systems: your data is in a database under a schema of doubtful provenance. Read More...
Good news: the unspeakable SysV init dreck, which somehow wormed its way into the popular Linux distributions, is moribund. It has been replaced by upstart in Fedora (since at least F9, possibly earlier). The upstart project appears to have come from Ubuntu, so I guess that similar remarks apply there, too. Read More...
My current programming project is proceeding rather slowly, due to lack of time. Most days, I get literally a few minutes in a coffee break actually at a terminal. But there's always plenty of thinking time--on the walk to work, in the shower, or while washing up. Rarely with pen & paper to hand, unfortunately. I can't say that this is my favourite way to program, but it does help correct my tendency to spend too long tapping the keyboard, with insufficient cogitation. Read More...
So, I'm converting my website over to Drupal. This involves uploading all the Usenet articles. On the old website, there was -- more or less -- one page per newsgroup. That's about 16 pages. In Drupal, it seems to make sense to make each article a separate node. I've just counted, and that's nearly 700 nodes. Read More...
This website serves several purposes: it is a stable home for software that I have developed (or maintain); it is also a place where I can scratch my itch to write nerdy things. And it is a proving ground for my ideas in web site design and development. Read More...