Emacs the dark side? huh?

Use Emacs with all your hatred.. « Keeping it Small and Simple

My path towards the dark side has already begun: I’m currently reading the Emacs tutorial (C-h t)

Conferences and sponsorship

reddit.com: Pycon 2008 disappointment

All of this is to say that it is possible to get sponsorship without selling the conference. Not only that, but our experience with PPW suggests that all parties - including sponsors - benefit when the conference remains focused on the attendees' interests.

I think this is important:

Surprisingly, we got lots of sponsorship. Moreover, our sponsors tended to be companies that "got" the programming community and that our attendees were more likely to be interested in. In the end, our sponsors were happy and our attendees were happy.(My emphasis)

The wisdom on conferences is obviously based on the more general case where the audiences can be very varied in interests and in experience - when manning a booth I have been quite shocked by the lack of research by some attendees, but more imprtantly their lack of focus on what they wanted from their visit.

ISO & ECMA : whither credibility

Michael Tiemann sums it up nicely:

What I see in the Geneva proceedings (that have been reported, surely not the whole story) is that ISO believed as I did that product was less important than process, and now ISO must decide whether to acknowledge that it failed, damaging its brand in the short term, or deny it was wrong and risk ruining it forever.

What do you use Common Lisp for?

Xach asked what people do with CL and got rather a lot of responses, most very interesting. None of the big CL apps get a mention yet.

Me? I am playing with it: I use SBCL, Emacs and SLIME. I think I need macros, but I'm not sure yet!

New Powerball

I bought a Powerball Pro about a week ago, as I have been having problems with my wrists (too much keyboard work).

An incredible little device which certainly seems to exercise the wrists and fore-arms. So far I am going fairly slowly (6000 rpm) as it quite quickly makes joints ache :-(

However, after a while I have found that the normal wrist and elbow aches are decreasing - so I am happy. Will post progress again after a few more weeks

Mail in the Emacs World == mew, with gmail

I got the above mail package working in emacs on Ubuntu, but more importantly I got i going with Google mail.

On Ubuntu I installed mew and mew-bin ( I used the latest beta)

To get it working with gmail, you also need stunnel. The real break-through was finding this site and updating it to my settings. Thanks to zhang.

Now I just need to find a copy of bbdb-mew.el and I can hook up with the Big Brother Database. The advertised link is not working for me today: server not found :-(

Once again Sacha Chua is doing something interesting in this space

Ubuntu Mobile

Ubuntu Mobile takes on Apple touch interface

This looks very interesting: good looks like the iPhone, but the possibility of getting lots of interesting extra packages running on it.

Apple has a few problems for me: 1) every time I think about geting a Mac or an iPhone I read something about Apple placing restrictions on what you can do - no personal ringtone loads, only stuff from ITunes store.... 2)restrictions on the software the iPhone can run.

I don't want those types of restrictions - I just feel like I am about to give money to a bunch of control freaks.

So, for people like me, let's hope the Ubuntu Mobile looks good, is open, and runs on decent hardware

Linux vs. Windows: Installation

It is a measure of how much Linux has improved , that now my latest new component was automatically picked up and used in Linux (Ubuntu) whilst I had to download new software to get Windows.

The particular component was a new nVidia graphics card - the end result was great on both systems, though again the Gnome eye-candy was better than Windows (XP).

So Linux, which used to be really bad at automatically coping with all but the most popular hardware seems to be overtaking Windows in my experience.

Is Windows Vista any better ? I won't know until i get new hardware - this box won't cope with it.

Getting the Gunk out

For GTD fans here is an excellent summary of how to get further with the system.

They are all great but the high ( or low) -lights for me were:

• No tusted place of reference. For me part of this is space - I need to get rid of clutter before getting better equipment. Part is also my hankering after everything being electronic, but life just won't conform!!
• Blocking out both doing and processing time: my new job gives me far less scope to define regular slots in my diary, so i end up with none at all. I need tro be more dynamic
• Of course the last point also applies to the weekly review!

Slime Cheat Sheet

Here is a nice summary of Slime commands.

* It includes all of the SLIME commands from the SLIME manual
* It includes all of the Emacs commands from the built in tutorial
* It includes the main Emacs help keys
* The commands are sorted and grouped by functional area
* It’s all fits on one page

Nirvana in beta - weblocks

Weblocks looks interesting:

This is one of the main reasons I started Weblocks framework - I never wanted to write a line of HTML again.

and:

with closures-based actions, continuations-based control flow, stateful widgets, and a shiny new CLSQL backend store1, it may very well be the web development nirvana

I found this amusing:

Weblocks is relatively young, so there still may be some issues that need to be ironed out. Proceed with caution!

Nirvana postponed perhaps?

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More on org-mode

Sacha's book draft continues.

I hadn't seen the filtering on tags feature before, nor the bonus code - of course!

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Emacs.Net

Is it April 1st? ".. all the remaining emacs users....."

Watch that space

clipped from blogs.zdnet.com Developers are puzzling over recent clues blogged by a few Microsoft employees regarding a new “Emacs.Net” tool the company is building. Responding in comments on the Microsoft Channel 9 blog, Microsoft “Chief Modeling Officer” Don Box added a few more bits of information: “There are two kinds of emacs users: those who start up emacs in a top-level window and use M-x shell to do shell work, and those who live in tcsh/ksh/bash and crank up emacs -nw to take over their console/terminal window. “I was always in the former camp, and I believe that’s the design point for Doug (Purdy)’s project.  If you look up and down our hallway, all other remaining emacs users are in that former camp as well.”

Horrid, horrid, horrid!

From the BBC:

The death toll from two Baghdad market bombs allegedly carried by mentally disabled women and set off remotely has risen to nearly 100, say officials. (My emphasis added)

I suppose I have been around enough that I shouldn't be surprised at the depths that a few people can stoop to, but this is real low...

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More on emacs and butterflies.... and org-mode

From Phil Windley

Of course, I use emacs—always have and always will.

Interestingly I use it more and more - the current diver is org-mode which I find to be a wonderful, easy-to-use and light-weight way of tracking things, even though I live in a corporate Notes environment. Notes has many great features, but I just love the text based approach and the ability to filter out TODOs in a single view from multiple files. If I am typing notes in a meeting and there is a TODO I just hit a key combinations and type it in the flow of the notes. Not so good for converting incoming mails to TODOS - if only one tool could do everything!!

org-mode can be found here . Congraulations to Carsten Dominik and the rest ofthe community. Sacha Chua is writing a book including org-mode.

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Real Programmers

xkcd: Damit emacs!!

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TripIt

This site looks interesting: Tripit

No need to sign-up apparently. However, my ability to test this site out is hampered by my lack of air travel. Next time I book a UK train ticket I will try it out! But I'm not optimistic!!

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Implementing a blog in Common Lisp: Part 2

Velte continues his interesting tutorial.

(defmethod initialize-instance :after ((obj blog-post) &key)
"If :url-part wasn't non-nil when making the instance, generate it automatically."
cond ((eq nil (url-part obj))
(setf (url-part obj) (make-url-part (title obj))))))

The above is an interesting example of "aspect-oriented" programming!! Note the :after keyword and the typng of the argument.

I haven't had time to set this all up and follow along yet, perhaps next weekend will be quieter!!

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More on CouchDB

The SimpleDB comparison in this post seems very important

clipped from www.google.co.uk That's a great development. Good for IBM picking it up, too. Not knowing CouchDB too deeply, but the basic gist of it, I wonder how well the approach would translate into a cloud-based system, not too unlike Simple DB?

Damien Katz of CouchDB Joins IBM

clipped from www.google.co.uk Great news! I've accepted a permanent, full-time job with IBM. My primary duties are (drumroll....) CouchDB! So all the stuff I've been doing up until now for free I'll be doing full time and be getting paid for it! Yee Haw!