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Category: tips

Pearls Before Piglets

While Googling my way through the interwebs, I came across the 2008 Western Australian Certificate of Education sample examination for Stage 2 Biological Sciences. It contains this diagram: If you’re wondering, the entire hierarchy is drawn from Umberto Eco‘s novel Baudolino.

Refactoring in Haskell: Adding an Argument

Just a small tip on this: When you add an argument to a function that already exists you should check the existing usage of the function. Say you have this: f x y z = … … and you want: f x y z w = … First of all you should check the contexts [...]

Vacuuming Firefox’s sqlite3 databases

Firefox 3 was running very slow for me, so I desperately tried this, thinking that it wouldn’t make much difference. I was wrong; there was a noticeable speed improvement. From a bash shell: find ~/.mozilla -iname ‘*.sqlite’ -execdir sqlite3 {} ‘vacuum;’ \;

A useful gedit macro for LaTeX

Builds and displays your current LaTeX document, and removes all the temporary file spam. #!/bin/bash TMPDIR=$(mktemp -td)   rubber -d –into "$TMPDIR" "$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_NAME" && mv "$TMPDIR/${GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_NAME%tex}pdf" "$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_DIR"   if [ $? -eq 0 ] then evince "${GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_NAME%tex}pdf" & fi   rm -rf "$TMPDIR"