Learn You A Haskell HTML Bundle for offline viewing

It's been sometime I caught the functional programming bug and I've since been exploring Haskell in my free time. Needless to say, I've been amazed by how concise and elegant the code looks for non-trivial algorithms like qsort, permutations etc. (3 or 4 lines at most!)

The primary source I've been using to teach myself is Learn You A Haskell - a freely available online book with crazy illustrations by Miran Lipovača. He not only has a great sense of humor -- making it a fun ride even when dealing with mundane language details, but also a great knack for colorful doodles which ensure that you are never bored.

I collected the bundle of HTML pages for offline viewing ( a PDF version is available on his site, but I prefer HTML ) and I thought I should share it. Download it and have fun learning Haskell! Unzip the bundle and launch a file named 'chapters' in Firefox or Chrome to get to the table of contents.

Chromium / Chrome proxy configuration in Ubuntu 11.10

Let me get to the 'meta' content of the post after I finish with the chromium proxy configuration thing which took so much time for me to figure out.

Gnome 3 and Unity have been such a big fuck-ups (IMO) that I couldn't help ditching them both and found solace in Xfce which has a minimal but clean, fast interface which does not get in your way. But all was not well. Chromium reported that it can't access the system proxy configuration, so I had to look out for a way to set that up manually. Ultimately the following simple solution worked for me.

We need to supply the proxy server, bypass list etc. as environment variables to chromium. I tried setting them up in .bashrc, but I learnt that Chromium browser launched from a desktop icon would not have access to these variables. After trying various work arounds mentioned on forums I found out that the simplest solution to the problem is to edit a line in the file '/usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop'. Go to the line containing 'Exec=' and change it to look like the following line:

Exec=/usr/bin/env http_proxy="netmon.iitb.ac.in:80" no_proxy="localhost,127.0.0.1,iitb.ac.in" /usr/bin/chromium-browser

In the given example, replace the proxy server and bypass list with your own values. IITB users can copy paste the line straight away :)

Now about the meta part - so much has happened in the past few years that drastically changed my own perception of self that my ability to deconstruct my thoughts has taken a considerable hit. I am no longer as confident about the methods, assumptions I used to employ to analyze my observations and far less sure about the conclusions I reach. Needless to say, this certainly has not done any good to the already meager levels of motivation I have when I undertake some creative effort such as writing.

Introduction

Life is pretty interesting. It sometimes looks as if everything is predetermined, destined to happen and at some other times it appears as if everything is of our own doing. We act as if our own wellness is all that matters when we know how insignificant our own existence is to the world. Life is full of such conflicting interests, contradictions, paradoxes and yet we seek a well laid out plan (or an 'algorithm' to be precise) to tackle our way through it. Some of us so passionately believe in the existence of such an algorithm that they keep cursing themselves no end whenever they fail to do something they thought should be done.

Given the interesting nature of the problem that is life, one is definitely interested in remembering every now and then how we dealt with our own lives. This, I think, is the real reason people get 'nostalgic'. This blog is thus primarily meant to serve as the record of what I went through in my life. It is essentially an attempt to capture the various aspects of the times, society, culture that I lived through. I am gifted with a reasonably good memory and I still vividly remember all the minute details of various happenings in my childhood. So, I thought it's a good idea to pen them down while the memories are still fresh.

I believe I'm pretty bad at creativity and I don't think there is a minute chance that anyone who reads this gets entertained unless he/she has a knack of reading long essays, rants, analyses. Still I'll do my level best to keep it interesting!

Coming to the name of this blog - well, as I said I suck at coming up with a creative name, and I thus chose 'white noise' to connote the random, non correlated nature of the posts with no specific purpose.