One of the fundamental operators in functional languages is ‘cons’. It concatenates lists of things together, and since strings are usually treated as lists of characters, cons gets a lot of use in string processing as well. One of the cool tricks I saw done with Objective-C a while ago was implementing cons on NSString, using : like Haskell and ML do. I have been unable to find the original site, so I decided to reimplement it myself recently.

Weekend project I made: cWavelet.

It’s a simple wavelet library written in pure C. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around wavelets off and on for about three months, and I finally got them enough to write a library. It is still being developed, but it does simple forward transforms (as far as I can tell correctly) right now. In the future, I hope to implement portions of it in OpenCL and/or MPI so I can try it out on the clusters at school.

The Mac OS X install on my Mini 9 was recently borked (friend was borrowing it, and an unclean shutdown corrupted the file system), and I didn’t have the install discs on me. I’d also been messing with the Lucid Lynx beta in a VM on my machine, and was very impressed with the level of polish, so I decided to install Ubuntu on the Mini again and see how it went.

I was reading this article a bit ago. In it Bjarne Stroustrup talks about the inadequacies of American CS education. One point he brings up resonated with me.