In the latest Rainer Joswig gave a presentation on developing Domain Specific Languages in Lisp. Now, Paolo Amoroso has set up a temporary mirror: you can download the video via HTTP (he is making the file available at least until the end of July 2005).
And, while I am at it, don't miss the available downloads at the latest Lisp International Conference page.
Enjoy!
I use the development version of Emacs, integrated into Debian following Jorgen's suggested setup, which I recommend to all of you interested in having the latest and greatest without losing Debian's facilities to manage elisp packages.
I use a dark background color scheme, built over the years from one the color-theme's stock themes (whose name i've forgotten right now). With it, i don't mind lacking antialiased fonts in Emacs. But sometimes I feel like switching to clearer colors for a change, and then i feel the pain: i find dark letters over a clear background ugly in a TFT, because i can see their ragged borders.
The cure seems to be nearing, though. Those of you adventurous enough may already play with experimental Xft GNU Emacs, or keep tuned, for one of these days i will give it a try.
To me, the love affair of Apple and Intel was the writing on the wall, the excuse I needed to realise I had been on the wrong track during the last six months. Moreover, on purely technical terms, the move stills seems despicable to me: I cannot come to terms with an "Intel inside" Macintosh instead of a sexy PowerPC-based one. I don't think a sensitive person should withstand the obscene intercourses of Jobs and Intel's CEO during the last WWDC keynote.
Anyway, this is just my own biased (over)reaction and, as I said, probably only my excuse to rush back home. This Ars Technica insider's article will give you a better-grounded view of the big switch.
I am sure you already noticed that I use GNU Arch as my default source control management system. It is arguably the most powerful distributed system around, and, besides, has a pretty good Emacs mode (xtla), besides other interesting add-ons, like the Arch-Magic suite.
On the downside, Arch is complex, and imposes some conventions that are hard to swallow, at least at first. The alternative is darcs: nearly as powerful, it is in addition simple to learn and use. It has also a couple of exotic qualities: it's written in Haskell (the language I would use if there were no Scheme or Lisp) and its operation model is based on a theory of patches with roots in quantum mechanics. But don't be afraid: you don't need to know neither Haskell nor QM to use it! Bill Clementson has a recent post on darcs, worth reading to get acquainted with this SCM.
On the practical side, there are a couple of darcs features that I find appealing (and which I miss in Arch): the possibility of recording separate changesets easily (using what darcs calls hunks), and the "every checkout is a repository" philosophy.
Despite my positive impression, I've never really made my mind up to go and give darcs a serious try. But now, we're probably going to use it at work, and I will have the chance to get the gist of it.
As mentioned in a previous post, a problem I had with using Gnus while living in Emacs is its synchronous nature: while you're fetching your news or mail, Emacs freezes. And, to me, that means 90% of my desktop is unusable until Gnus completes its fetching. I have fixed this problem by means of auxiliary programs that do the fetching in the background. In this way, Gnus scans for news against local files or servers, and finishes its fetchings in a breeze. Thus I use:
Since I've timed rss2email and leafnode to awake once every 60 minutes, this has also the side-effect of saving me distractions: new posts are only available each hour (I should do the same for fetchmail, following this excellent advice on the tyranny of email).
Finally, now that Gnus scanning is quick, I can make it automatic with
these lines in gnu.el:
(gnus-demon-init) (gnus-demon-add-handler 'gnus-demon-scan-news 60 nil)
I've become the new maintainer of emacs-wiki-journal, the Emacs
module I use to write these entries. It works in conjunction with the
excellent TheEmacsWiki:EmacsWikiMode. There are several things I'd like
to add and polish. My first changes are available in my GNU Arch
archive:
Archive: http://arch.hacks-galore.org/jao@gnu.org--2005 Category: emacs-wiki-journal--main--1.0
You can browse it using its Archzoom interface.
Quantum computing would be, in my opinion, a paradigm shift, a really new thing in the way we use and process information... if it were possible, that is. Recent studies are taking the existence of stable qubits into question:
A quantum computer can only function if the information exists for long enough to be processed. The so-called coherence of the qubit ensures that the quantum information remains intact. The researchers have now discovered that the coherence spontaneously disappears over the course of time and with this the stored information as well. This could pose a considerable problem for the development of a quantum
computer.
I have always found attractive getting news by pulling rather than
pushing. My first experience with such methods were via w3m-el 's
Antenna: you keep a list of features, and w3m-el will check for you
whether they change. The next step was reading RSS feeds
via Firefox feed bookmarks, but I don't like them. You only get
the news title and, besides, Firefox doesn't run inside Emacs.
Since a couple of days ago, I was happy with Gnus' nrss backend:
when you're in the groups buffer, just press G R and introduce the
feed's URL, and it will appear as a group with one message per news.
Quite nice... except that it's sloooow, which combined with Gnus being
synchronous, quickly becomes a nuisance.
So I was glad to discover (thanks to forcer in #ideologies),
rss2email, a simple (like all nice things!) Python scripts which reads
and parses feeds and sends the result via email, where I can retreive
them using Gnus, with appropriate filtering. Being an independent
process peridically run by cron, rss2email does not interfere with
my workflow while allowing me to stay in emacs all the time.
You may have notice the appearance of a list of links to previous
entries down this page. The blisses of Elisp, again: just a quick hack
of emacs-wiki-journal, and voila, there they are. If you're
interested, here's the code.
As you all know, Emacs is my operating system, Linux being those drivers it uses to access the hardware.
That said, I know how to use Vim reasonably well, since its my quick editor of choice when I am doing quick modifications to, say, configuration files in a remote machine.
But this may change: I've just discovered QEmacs (for Quick Emacs), a very small but powerful UNIX editor made to be fast and comfy for us Emacs addicts. Despite its little size, it has lots of features with the Emacs look and feel. Worth a try.