The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

I have seen many solutions to how to make controllers talk to each other whilst at the same time remaining within "da rulez" of writing Angular applications. I have been using Angular for about a month now and at times it has been swearier than a good Haskell session, it is most definitely worth it all in the end. I have written a really nice looking web application for my employer and they seem to like it. I think Angular. One thing I really aced (to my own satisfaction at least) was wrapping a REST (of any type) API using a resource. I will make a separate post about that. Do the simplest thing... Here is my own solution to the problem of how you can make different controllers communicate cleanly using the "event" system that Angular provides. All you have to do is ensure that the following event listener is added to your application root-scope: App.run( function( $rootScope )) { $rootScope.$on('broadcast', function( e, data ) { if (undef

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! Sort the documentation soon please!  More soon, I really do like it though. :)

I have understood the concept of "currying" for quite some time now but it wasn't until last night that I really understood how useful it (currying) can be when you want to use a standard library function but pass it something slightly different... I was playing with reading a file using the "withFile" function, withFile :: FilePath -> IOMode -> (Handle -> IO r) -> IO r Thing is, the function I wanted to write, as part of its duties, needed to print the filename to the console output before doing its thing... I knew that it could be done and for once I was going to think it through and make it happen! My function had the same type, (Handle -> IO r) , but now I wanted to add in the String that would be the filename and the penny dropped... by using partial application I could "part-bake" a call to my function and leave it in such a state that it would "fit" the required type... read on... got: Handle -> IO r

A few nights back I decided to return to an on-going self-education project in Haskell and much to my dismay, when I issued the "ghc --make ..." utterance it failed to complete and instead gave me the error: $ ghc --make hwtest.hs Linking hwtest ... /usr/bin/ld: --hash-size=31: unknown option usr/bin/ld: use the --help option for usage information collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status WTF? When did my linker system or GHC break when I wasn't looking? After two unsuccessful postings to the Haskell beginners newsgroup (unsuccessful as in they appeared not to have made it through the inter-web) I gave up and dug a little harder and turned up this post on the web: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cvs-ghc/2011-November/068562.html Bingo. I remedied the situation by performing this from the command line: sudo apt-get remove binutils-gold I didn't even know I had this package but then I suddenly remembered that a few nights previous and had foun

This is another article in my attempts to find new ways of looking at PHP and making it less of a chore to type in all that code. As much as I love PHP I hate wasting keystrokes. More typing is more errors is more grief. Being an off and on user of Lisp, although not as much as I used to, one of the things that I always liked in Lisp was the ability to be able to return multiple values from a function at once using (values) and then marry that with (multiple-value-bind) to create convenient named bindings for whatever you were about to do. I recently found myself wanting to return a couple of values from a helper function and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of having to type all those character required to create an array with keys for the two values and then I remembered MVB and a little light went on in my head! If somebody else has already done this then I apologise up front but it was new to me and I haven't seen it anywhere else so this could be a first!

I decided recently, while starting a new project, that it would be interesting to try and take some of my new found paradigms from Haskell back into the relative slums of PHP. As much as I like the fact that PHP just works, the more I get into Haskell the more I resent having to type reams and reams of code in PHP just to get things done. That's just me and I won't change! One of the things that I am really starting to miss now that I understand Monads (at least enough to write them and use them, my own and the libraries) is the ability to be able to have "Maybe". It is such a lovely way of handling data when there really isn't anything and it sure as hell kicks ass over using "NULL" as a return type. PHP is riddled with functions that return FALSE to mean they didn't actually work or some other value if they did which makes a whole mockery of its so called "types". Case in point, when using PDO for example (I could be wrong but I do

I recently had the task of learning how to implement our internal company PHP coding standards documents which exist only as a set of JIRA pages into something that could be integrated into the subversion pre-commit checking phase so that not only does code have to be syntax error free, it now also has to adhere to the coding standards. I remembered reading about PHP_CodeSniffer (PCS) and volunteered to "have a look" and see if I could implement one of the more simpler standards, our variable naming convention, as a starter exercise. Well, after the mandatory head-banging and spike in coffee consumption that accompanies learning new stuff, I became very impressed by the way that PCS actually does what it does. It builds upon the token_get_all()   function and creates not just an array of tokens and there positions but it also figures out (I read the source for half an hour!) which bits of code are contained within other bits of code; in other words the context within which