ByMyReckoning

I really like this picture of a mother using a Segway.

Yesterday I came across an old post at Deep End Dining site describing a Singaporean delicacy called balut, that reminded me of the old maxim "The chicken is involved but the pig is committed", that referred to the role of the participants/ingredients in a traditional English breakfast.

In Singapore this is definitely not the case.

Balut appears to be the result of boiling a partially developed ducks egg. Essentially a foetus with cartilage and a few other chewy bits.

I have to spend some time investigating the lift framework by Dave Pollack which is based on Scala.

Over at Lambda the Ultimate Philippa Cowderoy has announced her intention to organise an AngloHaskell event for 2007.

Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen have announced that they will collaborate on a new Haskell book entitled Real-World Haskell. The book will be published through O'Reilly under the creative commons license.

As the title suggests it will be aimed at getting readers up, running and solving real problems with the language.

The site says:

By the end of the book readers should be able to write real libraries and applications in Haskell, and be able to:

* design data structures
* know how to write, and when to use, monads and monad transformers
* use Haskell’s concurrency and parallelism abstractions
* be able to write parsers for custom formats in Parsec.
* be able to do IO and binary IO of all forms
* be able to bind Haskell to foreign functions in C
* be able to do database, network and gui programming
* know how to do exception and error handling in Haskell
* have a good knowledge of the core libraries
* be able to use the type system to track and prevent errors
* take advantage of tools like QuickCheck, Cabal and Haddock
* understand advanced parts of the language, such as GADTs and MPTCs.

There's definitely a place for this book amongst the functional programming books and the Haskell tile in particular.