Forest Park Pictures

I went for a bike ride in Forest Park in Portland today. This park is great; huge and very nearby. Today I finally got around to taking some photos.
This is how most of the park looks. It goes on for miles and miles like this with a dirt track. There are side trails too where you can walk or horseback ride. Haven't seen any horses there yet. Photos of the park usually don't seem to turn out too well, because you're just surrounded by trees, and I'm not a good enough photographer to capture it.

Portland is a bike friendly city

But I'm sure shapr will be pleased to know that it's a unicycle friendly city as well!

Cabal and Layered Tools

This past week we released Cabal 0.5, which I'm calling a release-candidate for 0.6, since 0.6 is the one that's going to be in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler version 6.4, set to release Really Soon.
The cabal is a standard interface for building and installing Haskell tools. I'm very pleased that there are already some tools layered on top of it, like dh_haskell, for building Debian packages based on Cabal Haskell packages. cabal2rpm is a similar tool for rpms, Hackage (implemented on Linux with a Haskell SQL interface) is a Haskell Package database. Hackage will eventually implement an apt-get type interface for installing packages and their dependencies. Haskell support for visual studio is also layered on the Cabal.
Maybe someone (maybe me) will implement some Eclipse plugin for Haskell based on Cabal. Though I can never get Eclipse to work.
I'm really happy that a lot of people are hacking on Cabal and making really great feature requests and bug reports.  

MSN Has a New Search Engine

Apparently MS has a new search engine to compete with Google. One article I read said that they seek to provide answers. Maybe this is supposed to be something like Ask Jeeves?
In any case, work has been nuts and I haven't had a chance to read up on it or try it out. I went to MSN.com today to do a search and of course typed in "linux" since I wanted my very first search on MSN.com to be memorable.
The first result is a "sponsored link", AKA an advertisement purchased by... Microsoft! And it's tag line says that windows outperforms Linux. I guess they thought that was my question. Or maybe they knew I was just being a jerk and so they are likewise just being jerks.
They're setting themselves apart from Google already!