Going minimalistic
I came to ArchLinux in the mindset of taking more control over my OS, but also to move away from the eye-candy-yet-bloated desktop environments. So when I installed Arch I also installed Gnome 3, while I got used to the OS. Gnome 3 is nice, and I enjoyed using it. Still, my laptop is old, has a chipset instead of a proper graphics card so it was slow. The more important point is that I no longer appreciate this cpu expensive eye-candiness.
Moving to ArchLinux
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. A. Einstein Last week I decided to move to ArchLinux. I wasn’t excited at all with the release of Oneiric, as it was all about unity, and nothing more. The ubuntu button moved inside the dock, not in the top level bar, etc. I upgraded from Natty and everything went flawless as usual. But when I saw I had to use unity, I just got bored of having things decided for me.
Learning Haskell
For some time I was looking at a functional language to learn, as it is another approach on solving the problems we encounter every day. I started to look at Erlang, as it is used for CouchDB. Still, it is more network oriented, and I wanted something more general. I also thought of Lisp and Scheme. Then I stumbled upon an article from Simon Peyton-Jones, “On the importance of being the right size: the challenge of conducting realistic experiments”.
Pure procedures in Fortran
In Fortran, a keyword I haven’t used enough so far is PURE. We want functions but also many subroutines to avoid side-effects. To ensure this, Fortran let us add the keyword PURE in front of a procedure declaration in order to tell the compiler that it does not contain any side-effect. As I keep forgetting the list of things to avoid in a PURE procedure, I write them down here in order to find them quickly too.
Chi più spende, meno spende
I got this proverb from an italian friend who was quoting his grandmother. This means litterally “who spends more, spends less”. I’ve been thinking about it for some time. First, this was the argument that made me go for my new Bose bluetooth headset, which is quite expensive. I bought a Bose Mini Soundlink some months ago and I am completely happy with it. It was also not cheap, but, the counterparts: