Danie Roux

I have been slowly adding my books to LibraryThing. I quite like it and I’m hoping that it will help me discover some new books and authors. Based on what I own, LibraryThing makes suggestions of other books I might like.
But LibraryThing has another, unusual, feature which they call UnSuggester:
“Unsuggester takes ‘people who like this [...]

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Breaking down Haskell FFI (Foreign Function Interface) to a very simple, working example.

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Google Apps launched a few weeks ago. This week I wanted to transfer my email from the old email account (the one that ends with @gmail.com) to the new one. I thought it would be as easy as POP’ing1 all the email from the old account with mutt and then bounce it straight onto the [...]

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UPDATE (25 March 2010): South Africa can now receive money as well. The Daily Maverick (which you should be reading anyway) has the whole story.
We South Africans are now again allowed to create Paypal accounts. Go ahead, try it. You will be up and ready to pay/receive money in under 10 minutes.
Seven months ago was [...]

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The problem: Client-Server needs a gatekeeper
CVS has been the preferred version control system for Open Source projects for a very long time now. CVS in its current form was created in 1989! It has a number of limitations, most notably in renaming files and directories (you can’t). So some core developers of CVS came together [...]

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We got new toys at work. Two BIG-IP load balancers from F5.
Seriously cool devices. Some highlights include:

It runs Linux kernel 2.4 in conjunction with some microkernel OS that F5 calls TMOS.
Customized, interactive monitors for server availability can be written in Perl.
Traffic flow can be modified using Tcl scripts. Basically anything can be inspected and modified, [...]

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Installing packages from source used to be the only way to get software onto your Linux box. SLS was the first real Linux distribution, but I believe Slackware was the first to offer package management, with Debian to offer the first package management with dependency resolution.
Since then, source installs became a problem. Installing your own [...]

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With my studies under control (for a certain given value of “control”) I feel like taking a walk on the Seaside again.
So tonight I grabbed the newest Squeak version from the official site. I then followed the instructions on the Seaside site and soon had a running Seaside application again.
One annoying thing though, it [...]

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Today I felt the need to defend my choice of mutt as an email client. I can not remember the exact circumstances, but mutt was compared
to something broken and horrid to use.
My first contact with mutt was in 1999. At that time, the only email clients installed on the university’s computers were Netscape 4 and [...]

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I’m teaching myself Haskell.
Its not easy going, I’ve been thinking in Object Oriented languages for too long! Getting used to the idea to actually abstract away state, is proving difficult.
I decided to take the plunge and first understand Lambda Calculus. Since this is the basis on which functional languages works, the idea is that from [...]

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