75 years ago today, the Nationalist government in the Republic of China instituted a fiat currency reform, immediately stabilizing prices and also raising revenues for the government.

And then the war against Japan happened, unfortunately. And then the Civil war, which by the way never officially ended. So here we are, half a century later, unsure just how many Chinas there are.

❦

I'm in Austria, severely distracted by the beauty of the Vienna. For those of you who have been following my relationship with Austria over the years, I'll just add that I'm not here in capacity of author of proto, I'm here because we're attending the premiere of a documentary in which my mother figures as one of the key characters. Way to go, mom!

Today I toyed around with the idea of making psyde more efficient. I'll step back a few steps to explain what this means.

psyde is the name of the application that generates static HTML for my blog. Right now, all it can do is generate my blog; when I'm done generalizing it, it's supposed to be capable of generating any static web page one tells it to.

Also — and this will probably sound a bit insane — every time I run psyde, it nukes my current local copy of the static web site, and generates a brand new one. That takes on the order of seven minutes. Now, most pages won't change from one such run to the next. psyde currently doesn't care; it just nukes it all and generates it from scratch. Not good.

So what would be a better option? Well, something akin to the ways Makefiles work would be neat. And in fact, this is exactly the problem Hakyll solves, the piece of software psyde is based on. Hakyll uses Kleisli arrows (a data structure similar to monads) to keep track of dependencies and what needs to be updated. I meant to do something similar in psyde, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

But today I've toyed a bit with the idea, locally. Maybe tomorrow I'll even have enough working code to attempt to put it in psyde itself. It'll be interesting to see how much the run time goes down.