I was recently telling lispy about some Haskell I was trying to write. I decided I'd try porting one of my Python scripts to Haskell. The script is used in emacs when composing e-mail replies and needs to do things like format citation text. One function I wrote computes the largest common prefix of a list of strings. He ended up reducing it about threefold from my original Haskell; here was the result:

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commonPrefix :: String -> String -> String
commonPrefix a b = map fst $ takeWhile (uncurry (==)) (zip a b)

commonPrefixLines :: [String] -> String
commonPrefixLines [] = ""
commonPrefixLines lines = foldl1 commonPrefix lines

I think that's pretty elegant. Thanks, lispy.

Seriously? The winter weather is especially persistent in the northwest this year. This is only the second day in the last month that it has been sunny AND warm (where warm is defined as "above 60 degrees") AND dry. It's a great day for biking, and it's the sort of day that brings the whole city out to walk, skate, run, bike, and play on the river waterfront in downtown Portland.

Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing Jonathan Coulton in concert, along with the extremely talented and hilarious Paul and Storm. Thanks go to keturn for getting me tickets and even saving two seats for D and me (the show was sold out). Coulton played Still Alive and a bunch of other great songs. It was a great opportunity to be able to see him perform.

In other news, I finally got a Twitter account. Anyone that knows me probably knows that I wait until a new web service is no longer new before I start using it, if I use it at all. (When will I learn? People always take my preferred username...)

Last Wednesday I took my first Violin lesson with Wendy Goodwin. It went really well and I'm excited to start sounding like total crap! I love Violin music and look forward to learning to play some. I think my music-reading skills will come back pretty quickly. Getting my left hand to adjust to the fingerboard will be another matter entirely.

Oh, and I have asparagus!

Finally...

We sold our car.

We've been thinking about doing it for about a year. D has been using TriMet almost exclusively since she started attending graduate school, but I drove to work at my previous job and for the first year of my current one. Last April, after learning too much I decided I was going to start taking the bus as often as I could. Since then, we've driven our car only two or three times per month, and with that transition complete, it was only a short jump to getting rid of the car altogether.

Now, we'll save on insurance, maintenance, gas, etc. And using TriMet and other services when we need them will be vastly cheaper, to say nothing of the other benefits.

When we need a car we can always use ZipCar or even rent one, but one of the great things about Portland is that if you live relatively close in, you just don't need a car. The key is realizing that.

Not having a car is really liberating. Woohoo!

In migrating my web services to a new server, I went ahead and upgraded the OpenID library that parsed.org and my other services use. Now they support OpenID 2 (in addition to OpenID 1), so if your identifier is served by a compliant provider, you can just enter your provider's URL into the input box to make login seamless. For example, myopenid.com identifier users can simply enter myopenid.com into the input box. For other features provided by OpenID 2, (maybe) read the spec.

I run a computing tips website, parsed.org. I originally created it so xinu and I could store IT tips in a central place. The tips cover everything from SQL tricks to command line tips to code samples in various languages.

The site has been online since Fall of 2004, and xinu and I created most of the initial content. I changed jobs and implemented OpenID support on parsed.org and added it to the myopenid.com directory. Since then, it has seen a few account creations per day. But new content wasn't rolling in: the site wasn't keeping people around.

So I decided to ask the users; many of the users that signed in chose to supply an e-mail address, so I kindly asked them what I could do to make parsed.org more compelling as a computing tip site.

So far I've gotten some really good suggestions and ideas from the people who responded:

• Better RSS feed coverage for individual tags and individual users' posts
• Automatic code highlighting and formatting
• Bookmarking (think gmail's starring feature)
• An "About" page to clarify the purpose of the site (it's true...)
• Tag cloud on the main page
• Better search interface (it currently doesn't search tags)
• Commenting support
• A "tip of the week" feature
• Tip voting
• The ability to get e-mail when interesting tips are posted (e.g., with certain tags)
• (P)avatar support
• Extensions (Firefox, Eclipse)

As time allows, I'm going to boil these down and start working on a few of them. A lot of these will go a long way to making parsed.org better.