Gtk2hs is my favorite way to do cross-platform GUI programming in Haskell — and it’s the toolkit to use if you want to work through the examples in the excellent *Real World Haskell*. But the official instructions for building gtk2hs on Windows leave out some important information, so here’s how I got it all working on Windows 7…

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I wrote a little old-school Windows HTA script to delete the .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._* junk files and directories typically littered across non-HFS media by Mac OS X:

You can download it from my GitHub account if you have a use for this sort of thing. Written and tested with Windows 7 and IE 8; I’m not sure how it will work with earlier versions of either. Standard disclaimers apply: use at your own risk, etc.

Incidentally, I think HTAs are really underrated as Windows scripting goes. More on that topic later…

Once again I’ve up and moved my whole little site here to a new platform — Wordpress 3, this time around, on top of Nginx + PHP-FPM + (obviously) MySQL on FreeBSD 8.1. I think I’m making a tradition of tearing down the site and rebuilding it from scratch once every, what, two years? Or maybe I’ll actually manage to keep it fresh this time around…

Heh.

Anyway, I could ramble on forever about why I ditched Movable Type and went with friggin’ WordPress. (What kind of wannabe hipster web developer doesn’t roll his or her own Django / Rails / whatever blogging software? And PHP?! Son, I am disappoint.) But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about a minor detail of how I exported the old site from MT.

You see, Movable Type supports text entry in Markdown format. And it’s cool and groovy and way better than typing out HTML by hand, but the problem is that when you ask MT to export your site, it exports your Markdown posts as unprocessed Markdown, not as HTML. So when you then attempt to import this into a program that doesn’t understand …

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Now that Firefox 3.5 is out, I wanted to get it running on my 64-bit Debian 5.0 laptop—but there’s no 3.5 package in Sid yet, as of July 2, and mozilla.com only carries 32-bit binary tarballs for Linux. So I had to build Firefox 3.5 from source. Fortunately this turned out to be a lot less painful than I had imagined; this post will show you how I did it, in case you’re in a similar spot.

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libidl-dev autoconf2.13
$ sudo apt-get build-dep iceweasel

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Looks like I’ll be rocking out on my way to work tomorrow…

One of the things that I really like about pf, the OpenBSD firewall, is how it lets you define dynamic packet filtering rules — rules that filter based on your network interfaces’ current addresses at the time of filtering. For instance, if I want to allow SSH connections to my laptop only from my local network:

pass in on xl0 inet proto tcp from (xl0:network) to any \
port ssh flags S/SFRA

(xl0:network) is not resolved to a specific address block at configuration load time; if you switch networks — say, if you go from home to work — the rule’s behavior will change accordingly.

Unless I have overlooked some recent change in Linux, this cannot be achieved in a direct fashion with iptables. You can insert a rule to reject non-LAN source addresses, but such a rule is static. When you change network addresses, the rule must be explicitly updated.

In lieu of rewriting all of netfilter to accommodate this use case (*cough*), I just wrote a shell script to help mitigate the pain of manually updating my laptop’s firewall rules — merely a shortcut to cut down on the amount of typing I do on any given …

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