I mentored at CoderDojo London this weekend. These are just some of my thoughts about it.

I qualified for Google Code Jam this year answering 3 out of 4 questions. I have no illusions about progressing very far, but I’m using it as an excuse to learn some Haskell and to write code faster.

As part of the learning process, I took one of my correct solutions over to the nice folks at the #haskell channel over on freenode and asked if there was a better way to do it. I learned something surprising.

As part of my preparation for Google Code Jam I’ve been working through the practice problems with Haskell.

I make a screencast on solving the Reverse Words problem, along with the mechanics of getting the problem inputs and submitting solutions. The style was heavily influenced by a sequence on Data Driven Programming in Haskell by Jonas Tullus

A while ago I answered a couple of questions on Stack Overflow using my .gitignore file as an example. I find it strangely satisfying to find that there are projects on GitHub that use it, and even the odd blogs has put it up as well.

I might as well have it on my own site:

Sometimes you want to test your localisations but you don’t want to go through the hassle of changing the settings on the simulator, or device, or your Mac for each one. There’s always the fear of setting some language that you don’t understand.

But, with Xcode4 schemes and a little argument passing this is a lot easier than it used to be. You can set up a scheme for each localisation which will let you run your iOS or Mac app under that localisation without having to change any settings.

This is the obligatory post announcing that I’ve moved this site off Wordpress to Octopress. It’s been almost a year since I posted anything. And most of what I did publish was about NSCoder Night.

The old site had the Solarized Dark theme - and once I saw that the code formatting on Octopress was that by default I decided to make the move. Now I can happily write Markdown formatted posts with Emacs and see an almost live preview of how it will look when published. I get to keep it on GitHub and have it in a repository.

I’ve tried to set the general colours to Solarized Light. Seems okay so far but still plenty of room for tweaking.

It’s been over a year that I’ve been running the NSCoder Night meetings in London from here, but I’ve now moved it to a site of its own. You can now get all the information from NSCoderNightLondon.com.

Blog style entries never really worked. I hope that having everything together in just a few pages on a site makes it easier for people who want to turn up.

I hope that it floats up higher in Google Rankings as well. This will also make it easier for people who want to turn up.

It came about that I wanted to do some work with git and signed tags. It’s been a while since I had looked at this, I’ve got some old entries up on keyservers that date back to 1999, and never on a Mac.

It turns out that it is quite simple to set up a minimal GPG environment – one that lets you work on the command line without having to set it up for Mail.app. This is about all I need it for.