I'm a relative beginner with Haskell, and like many people, to start with I was a little perplexed by the Haskell approach to I/O. A small worked example helped a lot. I was curious to see how easy it would be to do something like the webcomic scraper application implemented in Clojure here and here. This is a simple application, but it does do realistic I/O, downloading files from the web, writing them to disk, and also doing some computations on the file contents. Over the course of two articles, I'm going to build something comparable in Haskell. It turns out to be pretty easy!

We moved from Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada to Montpellier in March 2011. Montpellier is not so bad, but there are a lot of things I miss about Canada. Our friends, for one thing. But also the wide open spaces. One of the last sea kayaking trips I took in Canada was a solo outing to a small (very small!) island in the Gulf Islands National Park.

Whaleboat Island is a marine provincial park, but it's unmanaged, which means you are completely on your own: no campsites, no hookups, no wardens, no helpful information boards, and yes, no toilets. There's also the minor matter that the beach only exists at low tide and you have to climb up some cliffs to find a flat spot to pitch a tent. Apart from that, it's a perfect destination. Perfect for me anyway. I'd landed on Whaleboat once before, as a possible lunch spot, but that time no-one else seemed interested in clambering over rocks to eat their sandwiches and we ended up on an admittedly very pretty beach on Pylades Island.

This time though, I was on a mission. I'd bought myself a kayak a couple of days before, and was out to try it out, as well as checking out the camping possibilities on Whaleboat.

I've been meaning to start a blog for some time, but couldn't settle on a platform. I'd used Wordpress before for a little blog we set up to let our friends and family know what we were up to when we moved to Montpellier, and I liked it (easy to install, easy to use). For a personal blog though, I wanted something a bit more hackable (yeah, I know, you can hack on Wordpress too, but if it's going to be for fun, I want to be using something other than PHP!).