programming (and other) musings
I've moved the repositories of the geiser packages I maintain to codeberg , so make sure you update your remotes if you access them directly through git. The URLs are already updated in the ELPAs, so nothing changed if you installed them via their packages. Seventeen years and running. Happy hacking! Tags : emacs
After many years of switching between email systems, service providers, backup and sychronisation strategies, mail folders layouts, protocols and inadvertent replications, i ended up with a sizeable amount of local email folders containing, i was quite sure, lots of duplicates. My current email handling systems of choice, Gnus with nnml and notmuch, are pretty good at hiding them from me in normal…
I've been playing with macOS lately, and needed a quick way of grabbing the number of unread articles in NetNewsWire . So I wondered if I could somehow access its application badge label. The tip Turns out one can: lsappinfo info -app NetNewsWire -only StatusLabel which produces something like: "StatusLabel"={ "label"="6" } One day I'll learn awk and feel ashamed of what I'm about to write below,…
Here's a quick'n'dirty command to generate an org-mode rendering of an eww page, taking into account not only links (as the built-in org-eww-copy-for-org-mode does), but also headings, italic and bold faces. I am pretty sure it's full of corner cases and rough edges, but it's working for me as a starting point. ( defun jao-eww-to-org ( &optional dest) "Render the current eww buffer using org…
It took me twenty or thirty pages to really enter in this book, but once I got in its mood I had a truly great time. It includes a subliminal tour over classic literature, painting and philosophy all in a truy original narrative voice. Foster Wallace's afterword has also some interesting bits, once you pardon him his pretentiousness (definitely a much better writer than critic). And remember, the…
Vargas Llosa's political views are so obnoxious that I've been putting off reading him for decades out of contempt. But one of my teachers insisted I should forget about politics and read this one, or La fiesta del chivo , and I finally took the plunge. And I must say I am happy I did: the way Vargas Llosa plays with language in La casa verde is astounding, and he's able to do things I would have…
I've read good things about the forthcoming movie, and liked what I saw in the promotional video, but I cannot believe it's going to be near as good as this novel. The book has too many nuances, literary tricks and wordplay and paragraphs one has to read and reread, to be translated to a film. The latter might be its own work of art, and that's fine. But if you're curious about the movie, I'd…
Interesting bits elsewhere: Programming language semantics: It’s easy as 1,2,3 No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering Older entries Tags : sundry
Physically, this book is obnoxious: huge, wasted margins frame a reproduction of the original text that painstakingly tries to look as shabby as it was, including faded letters and all its typos, and its size and weight border on the unmanageable. Ah, but the contents is really good: on the one hand there's of course Joyce's text itself (after twenty years since the last time, my English, with the…
This is a beautiful book. Crystal-clear and insightful explanations, with the right amount of historical background and quite original outlook (without going overboard). I can only echo what other quoted reviewers have said: i wish i had had this book when i was studying these matters in earnest, i'm pretty sure i've understood some fine points for the first time only now! I'd also perhaps make an…
I've just released a new version of consult-recoll , which implements a couple of features that i am really liking, namely, grouping of search results by mime type: and inline snippets: Happy searches! Tags : emacs programming
A very interesting view of how a biographer started her career in the seventies, with two heavy-weights, Beckett and de Beauvoir. Bair calls the book a bio-memoir , and it's indeed quite deserving of a name of its own for its genre. One learns of the struggle it was not only to be a biographer of famous writers still living (and her fascinating relationship with them) but also to be a successful…
Lately, i've gravitated towards recoll as a unified search engine for all my local data, including org and text notes, documents in PDF or similar formats, HTML files, and local email. As a result, my little consult-recoll package has gone up a few notches up in my list. i've just released version 0.5, featuring live previews. Recoll is a local search engine that knows how to index a wide variety…
A nicely written (as always with Ishiguro) history of Stevens turned into an artificially intelligent being, in a near future reminiscent of Never let me go . In other words, i found this novel heavily inspired in previous works of the author, which i admittedly find better than this one, but that doesn't mean the book doesn't throw at you a bunch of provocative musings or lacks a tranquil beauty…
I was just watching Prot's explanation of his new package denote , a very elegant note-taking system with a stress on simplicity and, as the author puts it, low-tech requirements. Now, those are excellent qualities in my book, and i think i'd quickly become a denote user if it weren't for the fact that i already have a homegrown set of utilities following a similar philosophy. Inevitably, they…
A problem of using Emacs as my operating system is that any otherwise minor friction with its interface quickly becomes an irritant, and i thus find myself needed a truly smooth emacs-human interaction; or, to be more precise emacs-jao interaction: my must needs are going to be, sometimes, triffles to you, and the other way round. During the last year, a perceived sluggishness in Emacs's X11…
If you can read Spanish, i wouldn't miss the opportunity to read this beautfiul essay in the original: Irene Vallejo's prose is clear, elegant and very beautiful. It's a delight (and a relief) to read. And, if you can't read Spanish but have a translation handy, i wouldn't miss the opportunity to read it either, for a very entertaining account of the history of ancient books sprinkled with lots of…
I just got a second-hand copy of this classic. Sometimes, used books are more charming than new ones: Tags : books programming
I like to use a local smtp daemon for sending email from my laptop, because that way i can send emails even while disconnected and, even when the network is up, because i don't have to wait for the network protocol to be completed with a remote smarthost. Oh, and i also need local mail delivery. For many years i've used postfix to those ends; it has an acceptably simply-ish configuration; but…
Over the years, i've written perhaps hundreds of little emacs commands. Most of them looked useful at the time (why, i absolutely needed them!), but just faded away after a few weeks. There are a handful though that i use all the time, and i specially like it when their signal (features, usefulness) to noise (lines of code) ratio is above average. Here's one with a surprisingly high one: ( defun…
A gem introduced in emacs 23 that i've overlooked all these years: M-x apropos-library Tags : emacs
In the last couple of months, i've been moving from Gnus (after more than twenty years using it!) to notmuch, as part of a simplification journey (simpler code means a more hackable (emacs) environment) and also because tagging finally clicked-in (but don't believe anyone telling you that notmuch is only about tagging, it allows search and folder-based workflows just as nicely). Naturally, i've…
It had been a while since i last had this much fun with a programming languages book, and learnt so much in the process. It sure helped that i am a complete neophyte on the subject matter of dependent types: i had recently started playing with Idris , but reading this book really clarified the basics for me. I still remember how, after The little schemer kindled my love for parenthesis, The…
Reading mailing lists via Gnus by pointing it to the usenet service news.gmane.io is a well-known trick among emacsers. It has a couple of drawbacks, though: network latency and no search. The two problems have, as almost always with almost any problem in Emacs land, a cure. The names of the game are, in this case, leafnode and notmuch. I've been using leafnode since i was young to avoid network…
From a recent checkout of the Emacs source code: ;;; desktop.el --- save partial status of Emacs when killed -*- lexical-binding: t -*- ;; Copyright (C) 1993-1995, 1997, 2000-2021 Free Software Foundation, ;; Inc. ;; Author: Morten Welinder <terra@diku.dk> ;; Keywords: convenience ;; Favorite-brand-of-beer: None, I hate beer. ;; This file is part of GNU Emacs. Mine is Guinness :) Tags : emacs…
i've been using Bastian Bechtold 's org-static-blog for this blog for more than a year now. Back in the day, i mentioned how well it integrated with my emacs workflow and how its simplicity was a big asset 1 . During this year, i've contributed several little features to the package, and it's always been an easy and natural process. The last instance has been prompted by Sacha Chua asking me…
I use Dmitry Gutov's diff-hl to highlight (with fringe marks) modified hunks in my files under git revision control. The package comes with a command, diff-hl-next-hunk , that one can use to navigate them. So, taking a peek at consult-lines , it was straightforward to put together a consult function to navigate, with completion and preview (although i disable the latter) the hunks in the current…
i've found these last days a handful of really useful little emacs packages: smartscan , a simple way of navigating programming modes ( use-package smartscan :ensure t :commands smartscan-mode :init (add-hook 'prog-mode-hook #'smartscan-mode) :diminish ) git-link , because i almost never look at files using the browser, but some people don't have my repos checked out. Specially nice the bit about…
A couple of days ago, i was writing about embark and my first experiment defining a new embarking to play remote video streams. Omar Antolín Camarena, embark's author, has been kind enough to not only read it, but comment on a couple of significant improvements that i think well deserve this follow-up. First, you'll remember that we were defining a function to detect a video URL: ( defun…
I've just discovered Codeberg , a code hosting site that, finally , has let me create a user with plain emacs-w3m, shows me content reasonably well there, with a refreshingly uncluttered layout, handles graciously org files (why, it's even generating a table of contents for me), has a good privacy policy, it's not under the wings of any corporation and had my preferred username free for grabs. So…