Ubuntu Hardy has an old version of Erlang. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, but it turns out that R12B (the current release) added a few libraries that I use in my Project Euler solutions. Upgrading to Intrepid isn't really something I want to do at the moment (for reasons that I'll happily discuss over a beer) and language interpreters don't ( Read more... )

I recently had occasion to refactor a bunch of bash scripts, and one of the problems was that certain loop constructs were cropping up a lot. A quick search didn't turn up a way to do higher order functions in bash, so I (re)invented one:

higher_order() {
# some code
eval "$1"
# some more code
}The eval evaluates the code passed as a ( Read more... )

This post is some Linux geekery inspired by a problem a coworker solved today ( Read more... )

I have an mp3 player that only sorts on the first n characters of the filename, where n is small. (I suspect 6, due to the nature of the filesystem, but I've never bothered to check.) Thus, despite my files being numbered at the end of the file and thus sorting fine on any sane system, the mp3 player sees them in some crack-addled order only it ( Read more... )