• Global Hotkeys With .NET

    So, last year while working at Resolver Systems I worked with the author of Movable Python, which is a fairly neat application that lets you carry Python around on a USB stick. As an intellectual exercise I reimplemented the core functions in C# with a slightly less eccentric interface (no offence meant, Michael!), but was suprised to find I had to roll my own code to setup global hotkeys to run scripts, which was a nice feature of Movable I wanted to try and add.

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  • So, Does Anyone Even Use All These Darn CPU Instructions?

    That’s the question I found myself asking earlier this month when I was writing a simple compiler for an OCaml dialect called MinCaml. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a look at the Intel IA32 instruction references, but there are two volumes of detailed descriptions of all the functions one of these CPU provides: about 600 in total!

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  • Haskell Records Considered Grungy

    Ugly field selection syntax

    OK, the most trivial complaint first. If we have defined a record like this:

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  • Building YAWS For Windows

    Inspired by Yariv’s Blog, where he talks about a framework for building web applications in Erlang, and my so far abortive attempts to get into Erlang, I decided to give it another go with Erlyweb. Erlyweb depends on YAWS (Yet Another Web Server), however, and this proved to be a bit of a pain to install since I’m being difficult and using Windows on my development machine. So, in order to help any other lost souls who try to duplicate this feat in the future, I’m recording the process (tested against YAWS 1.68):

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