coolfactor blog

You may remember this post from a while back. I’d got myself a Wii Motion Plus and was playing about with getting reading from it onto my PC.

Well, the reason I was doing that was that I wanted to build a quadrotor.
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After a particularly frustrating marathon debugging session on Sunday, I was inspired to write a poem.
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I’ve been getting annoyed recently with Orange’s policy of deleting user accounts from their website after relatively short periods of inactivity. I don’t want to have to log into their website just to avoid having to register for a new account the next time I want to use it.

So I wrote a script to log in on my behalf. While it’s logged in, it may as well do something useful, so it downloads the PDF versions of my bills, skipping bills which it has already downloaded.

It’s in perl and uses WWW::Mechanize to do most of the work.

You can pull the source code using monotone from mtn.coolfactor.org (branch org.coolfactor.scraping.orange) or you can browse it here.

This weekend saw the Space Expansion Party at London Hackspace. I brought along a laser pointer, and set myself the task of building a laser interferometer out of whatever I could find lying around.
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I’ve spent a substantial chunk of this weekend upgrading a server which was somewhat lacking in discspace.

It’s a fairly old machine and as such doesn’t have SATA, but that’s not a showstopper. One PCI SATA card later, and a couple of 2TB SATA hard drives, and it’s good to go. In theory.

Except the SATA card was failing to recognise the hard drives.
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For years, I’ve had a simple public photo gallery hidden away with a semi-private URL, built with swiggle, which is a very simple gallery program which generates static indexes and thumbnails. It’s quite efficient, but not especially pretty. It’s time to change that.
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I wanted to revisit writing code in Haskell, and in doing so try to understand the I/O model a bit better. I spent quite some time reading texts and tutorials on monads, and discovered that most of them are utterly inaccessible unless you already understand monads.

Fortunately for me, I came across this blog post which gave a very good introduction to the concepts involved, while being down to earth enough that it didn’t require prior comprehension of monads.

Armed with this new level of understanding, I thought the best way to apply it would be to attempt an implementation of the UNIX sort program.
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