Rubrication

I’ve been playing with parsers a lot recently in no small part because of requirements at my job. Anyhow since I’m already interested in declarative programming languages, it wasn’t much of a jump to get myself completely immersed in the parsing literature. (read on…)

The last few weeks has been really exciting. Our friends Emily and Joe and their son Oisín came to visit us a few weeks ago. We managed to make our way up to Belfast, which was tremendously interesting. Truely a different world. We went on a tour of the city where we were able to see the huge blast walls sourounding the court house, the Unionist and Republican murals and the multistory police stations housed almost entirely underground. (read on…)

I’ve been having some talks on #prolog about the best way to implement effects in logic programming languages and have come across some really good information, due in large part to “ski” who hangs out on #prolog. (read on…)

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out how to cleanly place operators that take a database D to a database D’. In transactional logic we use a sequencing conjunction (and choice disjunction) in order to deal with lifting databases. This works fine as long as all programs that we write terminate. If we want non-terminating, server-like processes, than things become a little bit more complicated. In order to retain declarativeness we have to be a bit more careful. The reason is that we may have to backtrack through some effect if our computation fails. Lets look at a simple example. (read on…)

My grandparents gave me a digital camera!! Yeah! Even better, it works in linux without any hassle since it acts as a USB mass storage device rather than requiring some esoteric invocations.

I recently moved to dublin and have been eyeing the view out my back window for a photo since I moved into my house. Dublin 8 sees more development than I’ve ever seen in my life. There are cranes visible in nearly every direction.

You’ve probably already heard more about this than you want to regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, but I want to present what I think is a relatively novel argument. The gist is that dealing with global warming as if it was caused by man is sensible based on a risk analysis using a sort of Dutch Books style argument. (read on…)