Scoodi on TV

A couple of weeks ago, I was involved the filming of a "news-fo-tainment" segment where we got to talk about and promote Scoodi, the project I've been involved in for the past few months:



The impact that the segment had on the website traffic was a mixed blessing, and it would probably be fair to say that it caught us a little off guard. We've since fixed one of the main bottle necks, and by all accounts, the site is quite stable once again.

Installing GHC on OSX

During my quest to better understand Functors & Monads, it was suggested that I take a detour and learn Haskell first, as I was struggling a bit with Scala's type annotations. So, off to MacPorts I went:

  ~> sudo port install ghc
  --->  Fetching ghc
  --->  Verifying checksum(s) for ghc
  --->  Extracting ghc
  --->  Applying patches to ghc
  --->  Configuring ghc
  --->  Building ghc with target all

Half an hour later, I was still waiting for it to build. Something was not quite right. I killed the process and tried again (after issuing a sudo port clean ghc, because it seemed to be in an inconsistent state after killing it).

Same problem - it got up to building, then seemed to hang. Looking at top, I could see ghc-6.8.2 running intermittently. After a while, ghc-6.8.3 was also added to the list of processes (running intermittently), but still no progress on the build.

I gave it about 45 minutes before killing it again. Brad has been down this path before, and he put me on to the pre-packaged installer available from the http://haskell.org/ghc download page. As per the instructions, I installed XCode off the Leopard disc, then ran the installer, and hey presto, I was ghc hello_world.hs'ing it up!

Installing/upgrading Scala

Because I keep forgetting:

cd /opt
sudo tar xzf ~/install/scala-2.7.1.final.tgz
sudo rm scala
sudo ln -s scala-2.7.1.final scala
cd scala
sudo bin/sbaz install scala-devel-docs

This cryptic message when installing the docs indicates lack of privileges, ie, not running with sudo:

planning to install: scala-devel-docs/2.7.1.final
Installing...
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/scala-2.7.1.final/meta/cache/scala-devel-docs-2.7.1.final.zip.tmp (No such file or directory)