Git Short URLs
I knew for a fact this feature existed, but even so it took me a half hour to track down the syntax for it. To prevent myself ever needing to do that again, I'm putting it here.
To create a nice, short URL abbreviation for git, such as myserver:<project>.git, put the following in ~/.gitconfig
insteadOf = myserver:
That's all there is to it.
Haskell Exceptions
Haskell's absolute worst feature, in my opinion, is its system of exceptions. I have yet to see a single use of exceptions that wouldn't be better served by the use of a "Maybe" or an "Either" type. Luckily, in a small nod to sanity, Haskell provides 'Control.Exception.Base.try', which returns an Either type, with the exception left, and the value right.
Once you have that, it becomes easy to implement some sane functionality for exception handling, such as my current favorite functions, defaultOnError and errorToMaybe:
What the Hell, XDG?
Take a look at the XDG Base Directory Specification. It looks good, doesn't it? It really makes sense to have some "official" directories to store this kind of stuff in. Now look at the default locations listed:
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME - Looks like they nailed that pretty well. I might rather see some user-editable config files placed directly in '~/.app/', but '~/.config/app' is alright as a second choice.
$XDG_CACHE_HOME - Dead on. It is incredibly nice to have a single home for all those nasty little cache files that are a little too persistent to place in '/tmp'.
$XDG_DATA_HOME - Okay, it's a little bit ugly to store extra data in '~/.local/share', why couldn't they just put it in '~/.local'? But on the other hand, most applications don't even need extra data of that sort anyway, and it will rarely, if ever, be edited by a human, so it's at least a little bit acceptable.
$XDG_DATA_DIRS - Yeah, they're back on form for this one. Those two default directories cover basically every app in existence, so not a single fault can be found there.
$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS - WHAT THE FUCK! Why the hell do they decide every application needs to store their system-wide configuration in a special '/etc/xdg' directory? On my system, I count a grand total of three applications in there, of which I use one and have configured zero. For comparison, I count 157 files and directories in '/etc', other than '/etc/xdg'. Obviously, people will kind of expect to see their system-wide config files placed directly in '/etc'
What reason can there be for that kind of annoyance? When I have to go in and manually edit a system-wide config file, I will look for it in '/etc'. It would never even have occurred to me to look in '/etc/xdg'. At the very least, couldn't the default search path have been '/etc/xdg', followed by '/etc'?
This kind of trivial little issue weakens the entire specification, because such a seemingly inconsequential little rough edge can completely sour people's opinions of the whole document. And it would be a shame if that happened, because I would rather see the majority of these things become common convention.
Useful Haskell List Function
I keep finding myself with a long list of elements, which I need to split into a list of lists of those elements. For example, I need to go from [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] to [[0,1,2],[3,4,5],[6,7,8]]
So far, the best function I have found to do this is
But that seems a little bit overcomplicated for such a simple function. Am I missing a better, more obvious solution?