I blame the pie

Posted by Tom Moertel Tue, 14 Nov 2006 06:45:00 GMT

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. But I have a good excuse.

This weekend I baked myself an apple pie. I have the proof right here:

A slice of Tom's homemade apple pie

(Yeah, that’s an all-butter crust. Thank you, Sherry Yard.)

So you can see the problem. Whenever I have an amazing idea that simply must be shared on the blog and I start typing it up, it’s only a few minutes before I realize that instead of typing, I could be eating pie. And then, of course, the typing stops.

Then, when I’m eating the pie, I think to myself, Eating pie really is better than typing stuff up. No comparison, really. I mean, none at all. So, if I’m being perfectly honest with you, until the pie is gone the blog will suffer.

But I’m down to the final slice, so posting should resume shortly.

Thank you for your understanding.

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Lowering the bar for over a decade

Posted by Tom Moertel Sat, 04 Nov 2006 21:31:00 GMT

I was roaming through some old files today and stumbled upon a copy of my first web site, called, laughably enough, “The TomZone.” I am not kidding.

You think I’m making this stuff up? Well, feast your eyes on this:

Oh, the horror!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I scrolled down to the footer and saw this: “Revised: 22 Feb 1996“:

A less-horrifying screen cap of my old, old web site.

1996! That’s nuts! I’ve been bringing down the quality of the Web for over a decade? It doesn’t seem possible. And yet it’s true: this crap was unleashed upon unsuspecting Web “surfers” ten years ago.

And it’s been going downhill since.

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Minor site churn

Posted by Tom Moertel Sat, 04 Nov 2006 19:48:00 GMT

I’m going through some of my older posts and adding tags to them. I’m also colorizing source-code snippets when I find them. Both changes will cause articles to be updated, so if you’re subscribed to one of my feeds, you may be seeing some old content again. Sorry about that.

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Adding Haskell syntax highlighting to the Typo blogging system

Posted by Tom Moertel Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:01:00 GMT

Last night on #haskell, Don Stewart asked if I had seen HsColour for rendering syntax-highlighted Haskell in HTML. He had used it recently, he noted in passing, to add syntax highlighting to planet.haskell.org.

Now, I can’t be certain about this, but I suspect that Don’s question was cleverly designed to instill in me a subtle case of syntax-highlighting envy. For on my blog, Haskell code snippets were rendered in dreadfully boring uncolored text. But on his blog, the snippets dance in joyous polychromatic splendor.

Thus I was compelled to add Haskell syntax-highlighting to my blog.

Adding Haskell syntax-highlighting to Typo

My blog runs on the Ruby-on-Rails-powered Typo system, which allows for plug-in text filters. One of the included filters, in fact, is a syntax-highlighting filter for snippets of Ruby, XML, and YAML code. This filter is built upon the Ruby Syntax module, which wasn’t exactly designed for Haskell syntax analysis. So I set out to create a new plug-in filter based upon HsColour.

This task turned out to be easy. All I did was duplicate Typo’s existing syntax-highlighting filter and swap out its filtering code for the following:

IO.popen("HsColour -css", "r+") do |f|
  pid = fork { f.write text; f.close; exit! 0 }
  f.close_write
  text = f.read
  Process.waitpid pid
end

I also tweaked the post-processing regular expressions so that they would whittle away the HTML filler before and after the syntax-highlighted output of HsColour:

text.gsub!(/.*<p()re>/m, ...)
text.gsub!(/<\/pre>.*/m, ...)

A few more tweaks and I was done.

Now I can wrap my Haskell code in <typo:haskell> tags and it, too, will dance in joyous polychromatic splendor:

constructTable tspecs = do
    ecolspecs <- during "argument evaluation" $ do
        toNvps . concat =<< mapM splice tspecs
    let names = map fst ecolspecs
    let evecs = map snd ecolspecs
    vecs <- argof nm $ mapM evalVector evecs
    let vlens = map vlen vecs
    if length (group vlens) == 1
        then return . VTable $ mkTable (zip names vecs)
        else throwError $
             "table columns must be non-empty vectors of equal length"
  where
    nm = "table(...) constructor"
    splice (TCol envp)  = return [envp]
    splice (TSplice e)  = do
        val <- eval e
        case val of
            VTable t ->
                return $ zipWith mkNVP (tcnames t) (elems (tvecs t))
            VList gl ->
                liftM (zipWith mkNVP (map name . elems $ glnames gl)) $
                mapM asVectorNull (elems $ glvals gl)
            _ -> throwError $
                "can't construct table columns from (" ++
                show val ++ ")"
    mkNVP n vec = NVP n (mkNoPosExpr . EVal $ VVector vec)
    name ""     = "NA"
    name n      = n

If you want the filter code, here it is: haskell_controller.rb. Just drop it into components/plugins/textfilters and restart Typo. The corresponding CSS styles can be found in my user-styles.css.

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