Scalaz and a little brain melt

Another night, another Skills matter freebie, tonight’s dish is on practical Scalaz (which is a bolt on to normal Scala ). Served up by Chris Marshall ( @oxbow_lakes), This was a very sane and straight talking presentation dealing with both the good and bad of Scalaz. Covering the following topics:

-Data types
-Kinds
-Monoids
-Not having to do java folds
-Filters
-Conjunctions
-Endo types
-Validation

it was a very heavy talk, strong on the pure code and maths, more than once I had to go look up a word that was being used to get its precise definition, I was grateful that skills matter record all of these sessions as I really had concentrate rather than take notes (in fact I will have to go back and have another go at it as there were some parts that were beyond me).

The audience seemed to be split 50/50 on people that knew the stuff and those that were struggling to follow, a pleasant change to the normal “introduction To xxx” that assume every body is a idiot.
All in all the talk was very well given and was as clear as was humanly possible given the subject matter, i would advise people to go and watch it here, even if you don’t want to understand Scala or Scalaz, because if you have ever seen the programming roles on job sites with huge pay rates but demand “investment Banking experience” being able to follow this kind of stuff is why!

P.S. a good introducton to Scalaz can be found here

New Anime Series- Busou Shinki Moon angel

First Episode Review for: Busou Shinki Moon angel

Summary : My grief!! someone has taken a doll franchise and glued it to Angelic Layer, added the Chobis story line and bunged it on the web

Animation : So so, its alright

Plot Potential: See above!

Characters: Still see above

Music: Only a 5 min anime so only background music

Reminds me of: A less cute Angelic Layer

Overall: Pure franchise stuff, not one im waiting for each week

Disclaimer: These are mini reviews of anime’s that are fresh out in Japan and are not licensed in the UK, buy them once they have been licensed or at the very least buy the merchandise, remember if the anime makers make a loss, THEY WILL STOP MAKING ANIME!!

New Anime Series- Copihan

First Episode Review for: Copihan

Summary : 5 min web anime, school comedy centred around a young girl

Animation : Web anime are normally poorer quality or have that “flash vector” feel about them but this one is as good as any but the very serious anime,

Plot Potential: Not holding out much hope, its hard to do serious plot in 5 mins minus an opening, but still i actually watched it as they genuinely seemed to be trying to leaver one in

Characters: Nice characters, lots of quirky stereotypes, done well

Music: Very good opening for a 5 min anime

Reminds me of: Most school comedy anime, nothing leaps to mind

Overall: Best of the web animes is have seen and one ill keep watching, if only because i can watch the opening at least once a week

Disclaimer: These are mini reviews of anime’s that are fresh out in Japan and are not licensed in the UK, buy them once they have been licensed or at the very least buy the merchandise, remember if the anime makers make a loss, THEY WILL STOP MAKING ANIME!!

MongoDB at SkillsMatter

Popping to the Skillsmatter freebie evening sessions is one of the best ways of getting an introduction in to any open source project that I know of (particularly if you are in London)

The one I visited last night was for MongoDB which LDC are looking at in our general search to see which of the newer generation of NoSQL dbs we like best (yes yes i know they all have different usages cases but it nice to have a favourite that you spend a bit more time with), this “do” consists of a quick 45 min to 1 hour session (the content was from a 1.5 hour to 2 hour session) ,question time afterwards, and then pub time after that (with sponsored drinkies), a nice thing to pack your head with at the end of the day.

We were given a introduction of what happens on traditional relational db applications when they reach the serious levels and their limitations. and then how to design a NoSQL db from scratch to scale to a complete monster, the room was full of people who REALLY wanted to know stuff, but Alvin Richards (Senior Director of Enterprise Engineering at 10gen) REALLY knew his stuff and answered all comers with nary a pause. (and gave out freebies)

items handled were :

  • Sharding
  • Replication
  • Fail over and recovery (i love the arbiters)
  • Scaling (indexing still seems to cause the same bloody problems)
  • Safe writes (i was pleased to see that this is in mongodb as well as Cassandra)Thankfully Skillsmatter post the videos from all their talks online and you can see this one here (its well worth your time)

Umbuntu Panel Icons location

I cant bear not knowing how things work, which is one on the reason I use Linux, but even Linux hides stuff from you, one of which is where the icons in your menu bars ACTUALLY live, so they can be backed up/restored and if they are on a second monitor and for some reason cant get to that monitor you can still get to them

Anyway, on Umbuntu, they are located in the directoy

/home/user/.gconf/apps/panel

The individual icons are found in the /objects/object_XX format with a new directory created with each icon (and kept even if they are deleted)
Which icons are are shown where and in what order is kept in the /general/%gconf.xml file

nuff said