krondo

Book: The Translated Man (The Corsay Books)

dave — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:58:41 +0000

Wow. Steampunk noir and good stuff.

Book: Distrust That Particular Flavor

dave — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:55:56 +0000

Nice collection of non-fiction essays by Gibson. Got some good reads to put on my todo list from this one.

Book: Under the Amoral Bridge: A Cyberpunk Novel (The Bridge Chronicles)

dave — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:13:50 +0000

A pretty decent cyberpunk noir novel for 99 cents on the Kindle.

Book: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

dave — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 05:08:42 +0000

I loved this quirky and somewhat rambling tour of the evolutionary logic of deception and self-deception, illustrated with some surprisingly honest personal anecdotes as well as some guaranteed-to-be-controversial commentary on current events.

Book: [sic]: A Memoir

dave — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 06:15:39 +0000

A memoir set during the author’s bout with cancer, but it’s about much more than that. This is a dude who has lived a very interesting life.

Book: To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

dave — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 06:14:52 +0000

This history of World War I traces the intertwined lives of a selection of British citizens before and during the conflict. Some supported the war and some opposed it, and most of them were fairly important for their respective side.

The scope and senselessness of the tragedy are difficult to comprehend, but this book helps a little. What terrible mistakes are we making that future generations will look back on with incomprehension?

Thank you, Amy.

And We’re Back

dave — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 04:35:19 +0000

Site was down for a few days, should be OK now that I have my DNS in order.

Book: Cloud Atlas

dave — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 05:07:33 +0000

Wow. Impossible to say anything about this novel without giving away important details. Anyway, darn good read. Thanks for the tip, PB.

Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow

dave — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 04:12:02 +0000

Fantastic. Kahneman reviews much of the recent research in behavioral economics and related disciplines, including his own work (he is one of the founders of the field).

The overarching topic is the tension between our fast, intuitive modes of thought and our more deliberative, somewhat rational side.

It is an enlightening and humbling tour around the limits of human rationality.

Emacs flymake for HTML and Haskell modes

dave — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:17:16 +0000

I’m using the default Emacs 23 on Ubuntu 11.10 and both the HTML and Haskell flymake modes seem to be broken. For the HTML mode the problem seems to be that the version of xmlstarlet installed on Ubuntu needs another command line switch to make it print out the information that flymake needs, like line numbers. Here is some elisp code to fix that:

(defun flymake-xml-init ()
  (list "xmlstarlet"
        (list "val" "-e" "-q"
              (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
               'flymake-create-temp-inplace))))

Strictly speaking I don’t think the -q argument is actually needed, but it suppresses a superfluous line in the output.

For the Haskell mode, as far as I can tell it simply doesn’t work quite right and the elisp code is broken. Maybe I’m just not setting it up right, but out of the box it does not work. This makes it work using the hlint checker:

(defun haskell-flymake-init ()
  (list "hlint" (list (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
                       'flymake-create-temp-inplace))))

Happy hacking!