Been reading up on Haskell. A friend pointed me at a work-in-progress that will eventually be published as an O’Reilly book. It’s incredibly well written and explains the content in a way that is easily approachable, yet accurate.

It strikes me as a pretty profound language, as it has such a strict design and is so tightly coupled to pure mathematics. I’m having trouble imagining how such a literal implementation of mathematical ideas can apply powerfully to the messy real world, but either way, it looks like a nice language to be fluent enough in to think in terms of.

I hope Alan Perlis agrees.

Just came across this article on my mate Nick’s blog. He speaks the truth—-SSH is brilliant for copying stuff to and fro if you have access to a commandline and the receiving machine is publicly contactable on port 22.

To generalise, you can also copy an arbitrary tree of stuff around (including block devices, etc) using tar:

tar -zcvf - trinkets/ | ssh you@remote.machine.com 'tar -zxf -'

This will duplicate the trinkets/ folder to your home directory on remote.machine.com.