More Haskell Goodies
Today's interesting finds are the darcs repositories on cvs.haskell.org/darcs. Interesting directories are Numeric Prelude, Haskore, Haskell Xml Toolkit typesafe. Not that I have time to investigate those right now. I'm staring at Fermat's Last Margin. Things are slowly coming together.
In my zsh startup file I have these two aliases:
alias fin='aplay -q monkey.wav monkey.wav monkey.wav'
alias die='aplay -q yeep.wav yeep.wav'
That way I can do "long-running-compile-command && fin || die" and I hear the disruptive noises when there's an error, and excited monkey yeeps when it's done.
This is particularly useful when I'm building a large piece of Haskell source code and I'm not sure if all the dependencies are correct. If I wander off to hack on other code, I probably won't switch back for half an hour. If the compile died after five minutes, it might be half an hour before I check back to see what happened.
So this is definitely an improvement, but it's too manual and not general enough. Any suggestions for improvement? Cale Gibbard suggested making another alias like "notify long-running-compile-command" so it would work like nice. That's also a good idea, but I suspect there's a much better solution.
One way to improve the generality is to add visual output as well as the sounds, since I don't always have my headphones on my ears. Maybe there's an even more general solution like dbus or one of the other cross-application message queues in Linux' userspace or kernelspace?
The weekend is nearly over, and Fermat's Last Margin is not ready for release. Maybe I should have finished the code before I upgraded it to use the latest pre-release version of Flippi. Realistically, I should have spent less time chatting on IRC and more time coding. Ok then, no more IRC until FLM 0.1 is finished.