In a previous post “Deeply embedded DSLs in Haskell”, I introduced the AwesomePrelude. While the ideas behind that post haven’t changed, the implementation of the AwesomePrelude is radically different now.

The AwesomePrelude is reimplementation of the Haskell prelude in which all data types have been replaced with type classes. Embedded Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) can implement these type classes to get access to the functions defined in terms of the type classes. For example: by implementing the BoolC type class, a DSL gets to use the (&&), (||) and not functions.

Here’s a recording of our presentation:

The slides are online, and the code is available on github.
The reactive javascript example Sebastiaan mentions in the talk doesn’t use the AwesomePrelude per se, but is based on the same ideas.

Unfortunately, they also have the downside of generating heat and noise, so that’s why I keep one of mine at a friend’s house (also because he has a very fast internet connection). Strangely though, it seems he also isn’t to fond of all that heat and noise and turns the machine off when he thinks I’m not using it. So that’s why I needed a way to send a Wake on LAN signal, known as a magic packet, to remotely start the machine.

Yesterday I wrote a small Haskell program called wol (available on Hackage) to send the “magic packet” to his router. We had to flash his router with new firmware to be able to have it memorize the internal ip address/mac address/port combination, but now it’s working!

I must say, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to write this program. For some time, I was stuck on why the socket wasn’t working. Then I found out I shouldn’t use the PortNum constructor to construct PortNumbers, because the endianess doesn’t match on my machine. It turns out your supposed to use the Num instance of PortNumber and use functions like fromIntegral. I’m happy to see other people also noticed how annoying this is, and are discussing a revamped network package.

Anyway, now you can all start starting your machine remotely with wol (which, to be honest, is just a Haskell port of some PHP script I found online…).

If your like me, and like to keep up on all the different new packages, you can now follow Hackage on Twitter.

But be warned! There’s a lot happening, in the 3 days Hackage has been online, it has already tweeted more than 70 new releases.

The Twitter account is running a tool called hackage2twitter, build on top of the feed2twitter library for tweeting posts from a RSS or Atom feed.

If you want to pipe your own feed to Twitter, you can use the feed2twitter library or executable.

bool :: a -> a -> Bool -> a
bool x _ False = x
bool _ y True  = y

Well, I did. So I’m very happy to announce my first public Haskell library: bool-extras!