Moving from Windows 8 to Ubuntu (I'm a Haskell on Windows developer no more!)

I bought myself a new laptop the other day, and while I'm happy with it, it came with Windows 8. This wasn't an issue per se, once I looked up on the internet how to find the "shut down" button... Sure, the gestures are a bit annoying when you don't have a touch screen, but I could live with that.

But then I started running into familiar issues again, as I tried to set all the Haskell libraries I needed for a project: libraries not working on Windows, MinGW/MSYS/Cygwin hell, etc... I just couldn't take it anymore. So I guess this is an admission of defeat that when you need work done quickly using a significant number of Haskell libraries, you need a Unix based OS.

So I decided to dual boot the computer with Ubuntu. I don' really know why I chose Ubuntu, from looking around it looked like it was both stable and developer friendly.

I was first pleased to see that Windows would give me tools to resize my main partition. I remember a time where you had to use third party software to to do that!

I burned a DVD with the 12.10 image (I see 13.04 is out, I'll have to upgrade some day I suppose), and went with the Linux Secure install. It didn't recognize that I had a Windows install, so I configured my partitions and tried to understand what the messages about the boot loader meant. But when I restarted, I went straight to Windows as if Ubuntu didn't exist. So I restarted using the DVD, and launched the Boot Repair utility. At the end it told me that I had to change something in the UEFI options of the computer. I went in there and sure enough there was an entry for Ubuntu. Once I selected that, I could now see the dual boot screen, giving me the choice between Ubuntu and Windows, and both work! Success!

After that, not much sweat to report. I quickly appreciated apt-get, as opposed to the various downloads+install procedures you get for windows software. Sure, at the time I installed it, Eclipse was still 3.8 and not 4.2, but I'm not going to complain.

Ho, and the library I needed that I couldn't get to work on Windows? Installed like a charm.

I'm now a Ubuntu Haskell developer, and I don't regret it.

Samples of NXT (Lego Mindstorms) programming in Haskell

I've just created a new repository on GitHub called nxt-samples. It's only got one program now, a Bumper program that has the robot going straight till it hits something, then reversing and turning a bit, and going again (inspired by this Bumper Car, even though mine has tracks and no wheel). I've put this up because I didn't find it easy to get started programming a NXT robot, even with the excellent NXT library. Samples on the web were pretty scarce.

A few things bit me:
- not waiting for the final orders to be sent to the robot before exiting the program. This got me wondering a long time why the robot wasn't performing in a consistent manner. Now I'm resetting the motors at the start and end of the program.
- I found it's more reliable to check how much the motors have moved by repeatedly and wait till you reach the amount you wanted in the first place
- I added a simple command: when you press space the robot halts and the program stops. However, this doesn't work on Windows: you need to press space AND enter. Look here to see the woeful story of a Windows only, 4 year old, GHC bug that was fixed, but then reverted as it caused regressions in Cygwin and such. Every few months, that poor bug gets pushed to next release...  I know I'm so uncool to use Windows, but really... Can Haskell be really successful without working well on the OS that a lot of corporate developers still use?

Hopefully I'll add to these samples as I go on playing with NXT... Any feedback appreciated!

EclipseFP helper executables for Windows

Since people had sometimes problems building Haskell executables we use in EclipseFP, I thought I'd help by putting versions of the current Windows executables on sourceforge. So in you run Windows and have trouble building scion-browser or buildwrapper, you can grab them from here.

I know this isn't really in the spirit of "build from sources so you can check them yaddi yadda", but since even Cabal does it...

As usual, use at your own risk, etc.

Happy Haskell Hacking!

Hoogle Command Line on Windows

The new upcoming version of EclipseFP will feature Hoogle integration, thanks to the work of Alejandro Serrano, so I was doing some testing on one of my Windows machine (yes, I'm a Haskell hacker and a Windows user, so what?)... No real problem using Hoogle via the command line, but since it does require some other things to be installed, I though I'd post them there for reference.

Unlike Cabal, Hoogle uses external tools for some of its operations. These tools are I'd say part of any self-respecting Unix distribution, but not of Windows. So you'll need:

wget: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm
At time of writing, the download page is http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/files/wget/1.11.4-1/wget-1.11.4-1-setup.exe/download

gzip: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gzip.htm
At time of writing, the download page is http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/files/gzip/1.3.12-1/gzip-1.3.12-1-setup.exe/download

tar: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gtar.htm
At time of writing, the download page is http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/files/tar/1.13-1/tar-1.13-1-bin.exe/download

Install everything in the same directory and put the bin subdirectory in your PATH. hoogle data should run fine.

Note also that since it's using wget, if you have an HTTP proxy you need to configure wget to use it (Cabal uses the internet explorer connection settings and finds the proxy settings from that). The files is etc\wgetrc in the directory you installed wget, find the http_proxy entry and adapt to your settings.