Entered on 2012-04-22 Sun 22:48 -0400

A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.

Entered on 2012-04-20 Fri 12:55 -0400

google+ recently got a new look . the poor utilization of space was annoying me, so i decided to fix it and roll my own look . specifically, the annoying chatbar is gone and the newsfeed gets more screen real estate.

if others are interested in the same and want to save themselves the bother of spending 15-20 mins digging around with firebug, get the firefox addon stylish and create a 'style' with the following content:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("plus.google.com") {

   /* remove the chat sidebar; who needs it */
   .eub5Ne {
      display: none !important;
   }

   /* increase width for the main feed content. 70% works well for me but it */
   /* would probably be problematic for other people with smaller screen */
   /* resolutions. tweak to desire */
   .ncGWdc { width: 70% !important; }
   .SG { width: 100% !important; }
   .Te, .iH { width: auto !important; }
   /* make sure searches use all the whitespace too */
   .HWkrRb { width: 100% !important; }

   /* add a small margin to the right so it's not sticking with the page edge */
   .GjYYId, .ZeMNWc, .rjbLIe { margin-right: 5px !important; }
   .EvUqIc.cm2O3c { right: 6px !important; }
}

note that this hasn't been tested on a computer other than mine and, while somewhat unlikely, the style-hack as presented above may not work for others. if people run into problems, i would love to hear about them.

Entered on 2012-04-17 Tue 17:27 -0400

recently made the mistake of upgrading my server to ghc 7.4.1. i say mistake, because as soon as i did i started experiencing compilation hell in the form of cryptic "ExitFailure 11" messages from ghc. the annoying thing was that the failure was non-deterministic.

digging online turned up a possible explanation¹ and a fix. others on #haskell suggested that the fault may lie with cabal-install². what with the error being non-deterministic i decided to downgrade to ghc 7.0.4 instead of spending more time hunting down the root cause. posting this as a note-to-self should i be plagued with this problem on a future upgrade.

Entered on 2012-04-11 Wed 11:32 -0400

so i recently enabled disqus comments on my blog. everything was fine and dandy till i decided to give some of its features a try. as it turned out i wasn't able to load the 'moderate' page on disqus's site; it would show me a spinning animation, but would go no further.

at first i thought it might be ghostery's doing given how its default mode is to block disqus (you have to explicitly unblock disqus for the comments to be visible on a page), so i try disabling it entirely; no dice. i then decide to view the page in a new profile to make sure it really something was on my end. sure enough, the moderation page would load just fine with all the extensions disabled. time to pull out the big guns and delta-debug¹ on the space of extensions.

fifteen minutes later: the problem was a result of me using the https everywhere extension. or more specifically, because of https everywhere and the fact that i was loading disqus over http instead of https. disabling the extension, or loading the disqus website over https both fixed the issue. now i love https everywhere, but i also have a low threshold for annoyances (such as always having to check that i'm loading the https version of a site). luckily for people like me there is the https finder extension which automates the process of enforcing https connections when available. problem solved.

Entered on 2012-02-16 Thu 18:11 -0500

either i ran into someone who looked remarkably like Julian Assange trying to go incognito or he was sitting across from me in the metro at around 2012-02-16 Thu 12:00 -0500 when i boarded the station at Berri-UQAM. He got off at Lucien-L'Allier.

Entered on 2011-06-16 Thu 01:34 -0400

Testing the journal template for org-mode in emacs.¹

import Control.Monad (when, forever)
import System.IO (hFlush, stdout)

main = putStr "Gob's Program: Y/N?\n? " >> hFlush stdout >> fmap ("Y"==)
       getLine >>= flip when ( forever $ putStr "Penus " )

For the uninitiated, here's a reference.