why I like tech

Emacs lisp

2010-04-17T22:24:00.005+02:00

These last couple days I've been fiddling more and more with emacs lisp, aka elisp. Its nice to finally have the time to program for fun. I haven't done any lisp-like programming since Uni, and I've missed it.

Heres a little function I wrote a couple months ago which solves something which bugged me for a long time. At work, we work with DNS zone files alot, and we make heavy use of the $include directive. This means that one zone file is spread out among anything between one to dozens of files.

When opening one of these files, emacs looks through the syntax and decides that the contents of the buffer should be in DNS mode, and sets the major-mode accordingly. And with normal one-file zonefiles this wouldn't be a problem. In multi-file zonefiles, this becomes a pain, since it tries to help by incrementing the serial number in the SOA-record when saving.

In multi-file zonefiles all but one of the files (the first one, which $includes all the others) lack a SOA post. So emacs refuses to save complaining that it "Cannot locate SOA record".

So I wrote a very small and nice piece of advice which is called just before calling the soa serial increment function.

The thing is, we don't specify a Serial number at all- that is taken care of by the Makefile which does all the syntax checks, zone transfers, etc for us. So... we want to avoid incrementing the serial if

There is no SOA post
There is a SOA post, but a serial spaceholder is there too, namely '@SERIAL@'.

;; auto-activated if we're in dns-mode.
(defadvice dns-mode-soa-maybe-increment-serial (before maybe-set-increment)
  "if there is a dns soa post and no @SERIAL@, increment it. Otherwise, do nothing"
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (setq dns-mode-soa-auto-increment-serial
          (and (search-forward-regexp "IN[ ''\t'']+SOA" nil t)
               (not (search-forward-regexp "@SERIAL@" nil t))))
    )
  )
(ad-activate 'dns-mode-soa-maybe-increment-serial)

Sorting all A-records in region

2010-04-17T23:00:00.003+02:00

So, you've got a lot of A-records in your DNS zone file, and for one reason or the other you dont want to sort all the records in ascending order by IP. It could be that you have each A-record followed by TXTs or CNAMEs, or whatever.

I often want to know what IPs are free. By sorting them I can easily see which ones are not in use.

(defun sort-A-records (start-pos end-pos)
  "Given a DNS buffer containing a bunch of A-records, this
function finds all records inside a region and sorts them by ip
address. The output is placed in a temporary buffer called
'sorted-ips'.

Todo someday: support the GENERATE directive"
  (interactive "r")

  ;; --------------------------------------------------
  ;; Helper functions
  (defun eq-octet (a b index)
    (= (string-to-number (nth index a))
       (string-to-number (nth index b))))

  (defun lt-octet (a b index)
    (< (string-to-number (nth index a))
                    (string-to-number (nth index b))))


  (defun sort-hash-by-ip (hashtable)
    (let (mylist)
      (setq mylist         ;; Create a list of ip-hostname pairs
            (let (mylist)
              (maphash
               (lambda (kk vv)
                 (setq mylist (cons (list kk vv) mylist))) hashtable)
              mylist
              ))
      (sort mylist         ;; sort them by ip
            (lambda (y z)
              (setq y (split-string  (car y) "\\."))
              (setq z (split-string  (car z) "\\."))

              (if (eq-octet y z 0)
                  (if (eq-octet y z 1)
                      (if (eq-octet y z 2)
                          (lt-octet y z 3)
                        (lt-octet y z 2))
                    (lt-octet y z 1))
                (lt-octet y z 0))
              )
            )
      )
    )



  ;; --------------------------------------------------
  ;; Main body starts here
  (let (iphash)
    ;; create hash
    (setq iphash (make-hash-table :test 'equal))

    ;; if no region selected, just grab all A-records from point.
    (setq end-pos (if (= (point) (mark)) (end-of-buffer)))
    (if (> (point) (mark)) (exchange-point-and-mark))

    (while (search-forward-regexp
            "^\\([[:alnum:]\.-]+\\).*?[ ''\t'']A[ ''\t'']+.*?\\([[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+\.[[:digit:]]+\\)" end-pos 1)
      (puthash (match-string 2) (match-string 1) iphash)
      )

    (with-output-to-temp-buffer "sorted-ips"
      (let (item mylist)
        (setq mylist (sort-hash-by-ip iphash))
        (while (setq item (pop mylist))
          (princ (format "%s\t%s\n" (car item) (cadr item)))
          )
        )
      )
    )
  )

Word permutations

2009-09-20T22:17:00.003+02:00

I wrote a web-based word permutator in perl for getting all legal letter combos (also known as... words) given a string of characters. Why I wrote it? So that I can cheat when I get stuck when playing Scrabble and the like.

You can play with it here: http://blahonga2.yanson.org/ww

Modifying gnome-terminal to understand Spotify URIs

2009-09-20T21:27:00.003+02:00

My primary tool on my Debian box (asides from emacs) is gnome-terminal. I use mutt for email, and irssi for irc.

And since I'm an avid user of Spotify, and trade links to music with my friends and collegues, I've been irritated about the fact that I cant click on Spotify URIs in the terminal like I can with mailto: and http: tags.

So I fixed it. Its a rather simple fix, but very useful. Here's how I did it. Oh and btw, since Lenny's version of gnome-terminal is rather old, this fix works only on gnome-terminal version 2.22.3- the version which comes with Lenny.

Anyway, quick summary of what we'll do. We download the source for gnome-terminal, apply a little patch to it, compile the code, and register the spotify: URI with gnome.

Download and unpack the source code

$ wget  http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-terminal/2.22/gnome-terminal-2.22.3.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf gnome-terminal-2.22.3.tar.gz
$ cd gnome-terminal-2.22.3/

Apply patch

$ cat > gnome-terminal-spotify.diff <<EOF
87c87,88
<   FLAVOR_EMAIL
---
>   FLAVOR_EMAIL,
>   FLAVOR_SPOTIFY
314c315
< #define SCHEME    "(news:|telnet:|nntp:|file:/|https?:|ftps?:|webcal:)"
---
> #define SCHEME    "(news:|telnet:|nntp:|file:/|https?:|ftps?:|webcal:|spotify:)"
332a334,337
>                            "\\<(spotify:)[^<>\ \t\n\r]*\\>",
>                            FLAVOR_SPOTIFY);
> 
>   terminal_widget_match_add (screen->priv->term,
1438a1444,1446
>     case FLAVOR_SPOTIFY:
>       url = g_strdup (orig_url);
>       break;
EOF
$ patch src/terminal-screen.c gnome-terminal-spotify.diff

Compile the code

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

$ gconftool-2 --set --type=string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/command " wine 'c:\Program Files\Spotify\Spotify.exe' '-uri' '%s'"
$ gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/enabled true
$ gconftool-2 --set --type=bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/need-terminal false

Remember that all the different gnome-terminals run under the same process, so when testing you'll want to spawn one as a separate process:

/usr/local/bin/gnome-terminal --disable-factory

All done!

Pain upgrading the iPhone to 3.0 under Virtualbox

2009-07-11T01:41:00.005+02:00

Edit: I was informed by neh that all this was unnecessary, as you can get Vbox to auto-connects devices. Thanks Nathan!

Long story short: An upgrade to iphone version 3.0 under virtualbox and Debian as host system is possible, but it has to be done just right.

What you need to know before upgrading:

During the upgrade, the iPhone changes USB ID twice.

Yep thats about it. What you do is this.

Jack in your iPhone to your linux box.
Verify that it has been connected by running the command 'lsusb' in a terminal. You should see something like this:
```
$ lsusb | grep -i apple
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 05ac:1292 Apple, Inc. 
$
```
Now start virtualbox. In the settings for your Windows guestOS, under USB: check that your iPhone is visible and selected.
Start the guestOS. Your iPhone should be autodetected and iTunes should start up.
Tell iTunes to start the upgrade. (I have to admit I dont remember if iTunes prompted me to upgrade or if I somehow chose to. Click around till you get to upgrade.)
Once it starts to upgrade, you'll notice that an icon at the bottom of the vbox window (dont run full screen!) looks kind of like a usb stick. Hover your mouse over it, and you should see a popup with a string like "Apple Iphone".
Here's the tricky part. Once it is ready to upgrade, the iPhone drops into 'recovery mode', and it changes USB ID. When it changes USB ID it VirtualBox will
1. Detect that the old usb device (Apple Inc. iPhone) has disappeared.
2. not automatically present the new device which your linux machine has detected.
Turn off your guestOS (even if you need to SIGKILL it).
Start up Virtualbox again.
In the Settings for USB, look for the new device. It should be called something like "iPhone recovery device" or something.
Make sure that both your original iPhone device and the new device are visible in your list of USB devices. Only the recovery device need be checked.
Start up your guestOS.
Once started, check that the Recovery USB device is actually activated, by hovering over the USB icon at the bottom of the vbox window. If it doesn't show the name of the recovery device in bold, right click the icon and select it to activate it.
For me, this happened a number of times. There seems to be a timer involved- if you dont re-activate the device in time, you'll have to start again from the previous bullet. You'll get an error message- I think it was error 1604. Like I said, just restart the guestOS, and you should be fine.
Note: I had to restart my hostOS as well once, since I uncleanly killed the virtualbox process, leaving a tainted kernel module which refused to work properly.
After a while, the process reverses itself- that is, the recovery device is not considered necessary anymore, and it disappears from the list of USB devices. Instead, you'll need to actively select the regular iPhone device. The normal timer rule applies.
After a few more activating devices manually, you should be told by iTunes that the upgrade is complete. Now you'll need to re-activate the iphone device one last time for the final sync, to get all your precious data back into your system.

Thats about it!

Text-based Graphical Desktop Environment

2009-03-21T00:15:00.002+01:00

I was directed by reddit over to a project by a certain gentleman called Andrew Wales; where he has managed to run a X server using aalib to render the display.

You really have to check out the screenshots, totally awesome! http://www.meow.org.uk/stan/xserver

Imagine running mplayer with aalib as video out under an aalib X server!

emacs unstable?

2009-03-19T20:24:00.002+01:00

For the first time ever (as far as I remember anyway), emacs crashed on me. Or rather- it froze. I'm guessing it wasn't the core application as delivered by the GNU folks- its probably in one of the modules I loaded when I was testing connecting to twitter and running ssh from emacs.

I guess I've learned my lesson- start a separate instance of emacs for testing, leave the ordinary one alone. Right now I have no idea how many buffers and shells I had open... All I know is that my machine has an uptime of two months, and I'm rather certain that the first program I started was emacs. And I never turn it off...

Oh well.

Japanese music via last.fm

2009-03-13T22:11:00.003+01:00

For years I've been moaning over how hard it was to get a feel for what was popular in Japanese music. The other day I realized that I could satiate my desire for Japanese music from last.fm.

Hurrah!

continuous ls in bash

2008-12-14T15:23:00.006+01:00

Here's a bash function I use often at work, when I'm waiting for a file to be saved (or updated) in a directory. It runs

ls
-larth

regularly in your terminal. It works under bash, and assumes that you've set the checkwinsize setting in bash.

shopt -s checkwinsize

wls () { 
  arg=$1;
  seconds=${arg:=5};
  while true; do
    clear;
    echo "$(date) (refresh rate: ${seconds}s)";
    i=$COLUMNS;
    while test $i -gt 1; do
      echo -n '-';
      i=$(( $i - 1 ));
    done;
    echo;
    ls -larth |\
      tail -n $(( $LINES - 3 )) |\
      cut -c-$COLUMNS |\
      grep -v ^total;
    sleep $seconds;
  done
}

It keeps track of the size of your terminal, so if there are more files than the number of lines in your xterm it will not display the oldest ones. Likewise, if there are files with filenames which are very long, they will also be truncated.

Oh, and finally, it takes a number as param, so it will wait N seconds between updates. Default sleep time is 5.

A consistent titlebar in emacs

2008-12-14T16:47:00.002+01:00

If I know that I will be working for a while on a machine, I install emacs onto it. In the past, depending on the version of emacs and the build, I would have a different titlebar on my emacsen. Heres a bit of code which standardizes the titlebar, judging from certain environment variables.

;; Create a reasonable titlebar for emacs, which works
;; on both windows and unix.
;; Note: assumes HOSTNAME is exported.
(defun create_title_format (user host)
  "Creates a window title string"
  (interactive)
  (list (getenv user) "@" (getenv host) ":"
        '(:eval
          (if buffer-file-name
              (replace-regexp-in-string
               (getenv "HOME")
               "~"
               (buffer-file-name))
            (buffer-name))))
  )
;; Set window and icon title.
(if (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
    (setq frame-title-format
          (create_title_format "USERNAME" "COMPUTERNAME"))
  (setq frame-title-format
        (create_title_format "USER" "HOSTNAME")))

Easy bash file backup command

2008-12-18T23:41:00.005+01:00

If you want to backup a file, with timestamps (atime,ctime,mtime) preserved, you can run this command:

cp -pf --backup=t filename filename

Course, this is a pain to write, so an alias is in order:

alias bk='cp -pf --backup=t'

To use this alias, you can type

bk myimportantfile.txt myimportantfile.txt

But then why type it twice? Use a shell function instead:

bk () {
    [ "$1" == "-h" ] && \
        echo "Backs up one or more files." && \
        echo "usage: bk filename1 [filename2...]" && \
        return

    for f in $@ ; do
        local f="$1"; shift
        \cp -pf --backup=t "$f" "$f"
    done
}

Oh, and this script assumes

bash
gnu ls
gnu cp
no whitespaces in words.

Installing HP p1505n on Ubuntu 8.10

2009-01-19T22:59:00.011+01:00

... Well it really wasn't a problem after all. Here's what I did:

You'll need to install build-essentials first, to be able to compile in Ubuntu. Likewise, now would be a good time to install HPLIP if you haven't already done so:
```
sudo apt-get install build-essential hplip
```

Followed the instructions over at foo2xqx.rkkda.com. But to mirror their instructions:

wget http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
tar zxvf foo2zjs.tar.gz
cd foo2zjs
make
./getweb P1505
sudo make install
sudo make install-hotplug
sudo make cups

Ran system-config-printer in my xterm, in the GUI that would be at System->Administrator->Printing. Clicked on New.
Selected AppSocket/HP JetDirect, and entered my printer's IP address.
HP was pre-selected, I just hit Forward.
Scrolled down to "LaserJet P1505" (not P1505n!) and selected the recommended driver.
Gave the printer a name.
Tada! Now I can see my new laserprinter in the list of printers.

emacs via plink, Hummingbird, but no putty window

2009-03-11T22:15:00.004+01:00

At the office about 95% of all work I do is on unix machines, inside of emacs. Inside of emacs, I do most of my command-line work, SQL connections to sybase, I do my IRCing, I send email, and of course I edit and compile code in emacs as well. Typically I have between twenty to fifty buffers open at any given time.

But I sit by a windows machine. I have to use putty to connect to my primary development machine, where I commence with starting emacs which opens a window on my local machine under Hummingbird's X server.

The problem with this is that after a couple of days (or hours!) I forget which putty session spawned the emacs I'm sitting with. Inevitably I end up hitting ctrl-d to close the window, and it then... just hangs there, waiting for all daughter processes to die. And emacs proudly floats there on my screen, with all my open files, notes, running programs and sql sessions.

And I don't want to close it. But the hanging putty window is there, in my taskbar, taunting me. What to do?

I realized that I wanted to be able to start emacs on a remote machine without first opening a putty session. I wanted the windows equivalent of

ssh -XY remotemachine.foo.com "emacs --eval \(server-start\)"

Here's what I did.

First I made sure that pageant was running, and that it had my private key loaded. I made sure that it was auto-started by windos when I logged in.
Next I created a putty session which contained the configurations necessary for X11 tunnelling etc, gave it a name 'remoteSession'.
Now I created a .bat script which contained the following:
```
REM Startup emacs on remote machine
plink -X -A -agent -load remoteSession -l my_username ". .bash_profile ; emacs --eval $server-start$"
```
This script will, when run, connect to the remote machine and start up emacs as a server. I source .bash_profile since I have some environment settings there, yhou might not need it.
The thing is, the previous step works, but it leaves an ugly windows commandprompt window which just... well hangs there. If there's something that bugs me more than a useless putty session window, its the worlds ugliest shell. So I wrote a VBscript which starts the .bat script, but without a window.
```
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "c:\mattias_progs\devapp_emacs_server.bat" & 
Chr(34), 0 
Set WshShell = Nothing 
```
Finally I made a shortcut to the vb script into my start menu, so that I could fire it up at will.

Its a very small improvement, but it makes everything a little easier.

Breaking the internet paradigm with Websphere Message Broker

2009-03-11T21:41:00.001+01:00

I spent half of a day looking at what you can do with IBMs Websphere Message Broker (MB). I first thought that it was a simple suite of programs which acted 'middleware' between systems. But it quickly dawned on me that it was so much more.

Its clearly very useful. Putting it simply, you install a tube between two applications, and this tube takes care of transaction-based transport, caching, both low and high-level format conversions, routing, monitoring, and more; pretty much everything you can think of except the kitchen sink is included in this 'tube'.

So on one side of a transaction, you might have a legacy system which can only import comma-separated data from a file in seven-bit ASCII. On the other we might have a system which includes a Web service which spits out XML in UTF-16. Between them you have this 'tube', which will connect to the webservice, get a bunch of data, convert between the two formats (both hi and lo level) and deliver the data as a file to the target system.

Very nice. Very tempting.

Question is if the old rule of the Internet "Keep the network dumb, move intelligence out from the core towards to edges" applies here.

I think it does.

By making the network smart, the edges will become more and more dependent upon the network's smartness; And since the 'network' (in the example above, the 'tube') is actually a product delivered from a company, all the applications and thus organizations involved will be tightly locked-in to this company... which in MBs case is IBM.

Once it has set its teeth into you organization, how do you rip this code out without tearing your organization apart? But the pragmatist would answer "But why would we want to tear it out in the first place? Its so useful!"

True. But the path to hell is paved with good intentions...

echo 1234567890 - $(date %s) | bc

2009-02-13T18:04:00.002+01:00

Hurray! Hurray! It's 1234567890 day today!

Makemake

2009-02-01T22:21:00.010+01:00

Today I was doing nothing in particular when my son asked me about the planets. Being the geek that I am, I decided to look up the solar system in wikipedia.

Course, the article was, as expected, lengthy, but I expected a nice pic of the solar system in silhouette, so to say, with all the planets rowed up and all. What I didnt expect was that the 'dwarf planets' would be included.

Ok, so I'm like "Ok, these first four planets are the rocky planets, and those last four planets are our gassy planets. And these are our dwarf planets- Pluto, and-"

and I paused. Was someone pulling my leg? I've read about undetected sabotage in the wikipedia, could this be it? I mean, why was a perl hack which created Makefiles included in the names of the dwarf planets? Maybe an astronomer with a sense of humour? Nah, can't be. But still- it was there in front of me- a Dwarf planet called Makemake.

My son didn't really understand why I was suddenly so excited. I'm like- "wait, just a sec" and I looked up Makemake, and Ooooh! It was pronounced maké-maké. And it was "... the name of the creator of humanity and god of fertility in the mythos of the Rapanui, the native people of Easter Island ...".

Boy was I disappointed.

An old version of firefox for slower machines?

2009-02-01T15:37:00.005+01:00

I've been thinking about this for some time now- I have a very old laptop, a Vaio PCG-505RS. Its from 1998, but works quite well, albeit slowly. I haven't tested the firewire port, but otherwise I've gotten most of it up and running.

The problem is, of course, surfing the web. Running Firefox is... troublesome, since it consumes almost 50M, on this 64M RAM machine.

I've tried running dillo, which is, as they say, fast and lightweight, but it has pretty much no support for CSS and the like.

Which has gotten me thinking.. what if I install one of the original versions of firefox onto this laptop? The first version of Firefox, then called Pheonix must have been lightweight. At least I don't remember it hogging lots of memory. On the other hand, at the time I was probably too excited about a possible contender to Internet Explorer to be too picky about 'details' such as memory usage.

Anyway, I started looking around, and found this site, which seems to have all of them, precompiled. What I want is the source, but a quick look around the mozilla.org site didn't turn up any results.

I wonder where I can get the source for pheonix 0.1?

Silly HP p1505n

2009-01-19T22:20:00.002+01:00

We bought an HP p1505n LaserPrinter just prior to Christmas, and for one reason or the other I never got around to installing it.

The thing is, I really hate printers.

I always have. Somehow I find myself always distrusting machines with moving parts. Like those cellphones which are like in two parts which are cunningly attached, where you can rotate one section to get to the key pad. Like Automobiles- they normally break down when you need them most. Or, like in this case- printers.

Anyway, enough digressing. Last year I got a Color printer, and the HPLIP printer install app actually worked (!!). After that I was like... "Maybe, with the right tools, printing is not a problem anymore on Linux."

Not that printing has always been a problem- Back when I ran Gentoo Linux I normally used lprng, which, despite their horrible webpage delivers very easy-to-use and stable code. Managing printers with lprng was actually quite easy.

Enter CUPS (Common Unix Printing System). I get the reason why it was considered necessary- lprng and its relatives tend to be a little.. technical. Unix needed a simple automagic manager of printers. A couple of years ago I decided to swap Linux dists to Ubuntu, and I discovered that it was not only more complicated, but it was complicated on several layers of abstraction. It took quite a lot of hours to get things working, and subsequently I would dread the day something goes wrong, because then I would have to troubleshoot my CUPS.

Anyway. Like I said earlier, my previous install being a success and all, I'm like "This won't be so bad..." and I started HPLIP. I told HPLIP I had a new printer in my network, and yep, it discovered it and its model. It then said that it needed to download a driver for this printer, is it ok to download it - to which I said yes. Then after asking me to fill in some details (name, etc), it proudly told me that it was ready, and if I wanted to print a test page.

I answered 'yes'. After two to three minutes of waiting, I get a printout with the words:

**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.

Great. It felt like all the angst of CUPS revisited me. I really didn't want to troubleshoot this. So I didn't.

This was all last week. Now I'm going to try to get the damn thing to work. Wish me luck.

Paprika (2006)

2009-01-18T16:28:00.003+01:00

I really had no idea what we were going to watch when we inserted the movie Paprika into our player. For some reason I sort of expected an Eastern European detective story or something. Man was I in for a surprise :)

If I was a little sleepy when we sat down to watch the movie, that tiredness was jolted out of me with the opening scene- This was a really, really well animated Anime!

About a near future where it is possible to enter another person's dreams, it quickly gets freaky. Quite disturbing. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick's books- psychadelic and deep on one end and at the same time rather easy to digest.

The music score, by 平沢進 (Hirasawa Susumu) is totally awesome. Today, in the light of day, I listened to the soundtrack of the movie, and the Japanese electro-pop (which I normally do not like) really got to me- hypnotic, in some ways.

Finally, I did some searching on the google and Imdb, and discovered that the director- 今敏 (Kon Satoshi) - did some of my other favourites. He directed Tokyo Godfathers which we saw some months ago (About some homeless in Tokyo who discover a baby in a dumpster), and the first mini-movie in Memories, called 彼女の想いで (Kanojo no Omoide), called "Magnetic Rose" for some reason in the English translation. He also directed Perfect Blue which deals with another variant of insanity.

Anyway, Paprika was well worth watching. I normally don't suggest dubbing, but the story paces up at times and it's probably difficult to read (and digest) the subtitles. If you don't understand Japanese I won't get mad at you if you choose the dubbed version. I promise.

bye-bye Muttng! Hello again Mutt!

2009-01-15T23:02:00.002+01:00

For the last couply of years I've been an enthusiastic user of mutt-ng. Prior to using mutt-ng, I used mutt- but was really irritated over some things:

Changing IMAP directories took forever- it had to re-read all headers in that directory, which takes... time.
I found it a little irritating that I couldnt see a list of imap folders on the left, like in most GUI mail user agents (MUAs).

Enter mutt-ng. Mutt-ng took lots of mutt patches which for some reason hadn't found its way into mutt. Other than that it was the same old app. My two issues with mutt (see above) were dealt with. Yay!

Problem was, that since 2006 there hasn't really been any development in the project, and it made me wonder if mutt-ng had been perfected (ahem. No program is ever perfected right?), or if no-one used it anymore. If noone uses it... well, what DO they use then? Have they gone back to mutt, or have they jumped ship to other MUAs?

The other day I decided to make a clean upgrade on my home computer to Ubuntu 8.10, and for some reason or the other forgot to re-compile mutt-ng (I checked mail by ssh-ing to one of my other machines). A few days ago I was idling thru the zillions of packages in apt, and found... mutt-patched.

For all I can see there is no real difference between mutt-ng and mutt-patched in that both support the sidebar as well as header caching. The main difference lies in that mutt-patched is supported enough to actually have made it into apt.

Its nice to be back using mutt.

copying and pasting in emacs

2008-12-14T13:20:00.005+01:00

I've used emacs for almost 15 years, and it's strange, but when I wanted to copy and paste, I've always cut the text first, then pasted it back, then finally pasted it where I wanted it to be.

It's only recently that I noticed that M-w copied the text to the clipboard. Silly, I know.

Here's some commands I use regularly when editing text:

key binding	description	emacs command
C-space	Start selection of region. Everything selected is automatically copied to clipboard.	set-mark-command
C-p, C-M-p	Up one line, one block back, respectively	previous-line, backward-list
C-n, C-M-n	Down one line, one block forward, respectively	next-line, forward-list
C-f, M-f	Forward one letter, forward one word, respectively	forward-char, forward-word
C-b, M-b	Back one letter, back one word, respectively	backward-char, backward-word
C-w	Cut region to clipboard	kill-region
M-w	Copy region to clipboard	kill-ring-save
C-y	Paste most recent text from clipboard	yank
M-y	Cycle through clipboard history (start with one C-y, then follow with multiple M-y)	yank-pop

Firefox plugin: Its all Text!

2008-12-13T23:33:00.002+01:00

This is a firefox plugin I use all the time at work. For me its very useful- what does it do? Well, you know those textareas in web pages? Where you are supposed to write stuff, like um I dont know, blog posts, wiki entries, etc? They are a pain to write in. First off, they're too small, and then I miss all my shortcuts and macros from emacs.

Enter 'Its all Text!'. You install it, then you can tell it to make all editing come in a separate app. Since I use emacsclient (at work. At home I use gnuclient), I have an emacs server running on one of my desktops which the firefox plugin calls. An emacs window pops up, I get to type away, and when I hit C-c C-c. The text gets pushed into the textarea, and I'm done :)

This this much easier that bumbling about using g-client, but otoh its not a clean solution... Which to choose?

Ok, so here's how I got g-client to work

2008-12-13T23:31:00.006+01:00

g-client is an emacs library which enables your emacs to access blogger, google calendar, etc. I tried it in the previous post, and it seemed to work quite well, albeit a bit unpolished.

First off, I downloaded g-client from googlecode.com. Once I got it down, I followed the instructions over at emacsspeak- that is, I unpacked it, ran make, then tried to load the library into emacs.

Beep! Nope, I got an error complaining that emacs couldn't find something called 'g-cus-load'. After some googling, I found that it was enough to create a file with that name (g-cus-load.el), which contains the following line:

(provide 'g-cus-load)

After this, I ran into my next problem- how to use it? The 'manual' over at emacsspeak is terse to say the least- not much of a manual. I'm a bit too tired to start reading new code, so instead I just tried running various commands starting with gblogger (M-x gblogger tab tab).

Question is, how to customize? The manual states that I'm supposed to use the customize interface, but all I could find was an empty G group under Applications. Strange.

Anyhow, I'm writing in emacs right now, and its quite nice.

test from emacs

2008-12-13T23:21:00.002+01:00

Ok, here goes. I'm testing posting to blogger from my trusty ol editor. So far, so good. :)

Re-starting blog over on blogger

2008-12-13T22:35:00.004+01:00

So... I've decided to re-start my little diary. Its been over a year since I stopped, but I realized that I really missed writing down my ideas and what not.

Why did I decide to do it on Blogger and not nanoblogger, or vee? Well, I'm lazy. Damn lazy. I just can't be bothered to fiddle around for hours just getting the environment right. Instead, I can focus on content, and perhaps a bit on layout.

Now, the question is if I'm going to try to migrate my old posts into Blogger, or if I'll skip it. Right now, I don't think I could be bothered. We'll see.

For now, I'll just supply a link to my old blog, over at blahonga.yanson.org.