The Cliffs of Inanity

ELPA Update

I rewrote the ELPA web page the other day. Now it should be clearer about how to get your Emacs Lisp packages into the archive. I’ve also added a news section and uploaded a few more useful major modes.

Emacs Lisp package authors, please send me your code. I will upload it right away (I have an Emacs macro to upload a single .el file to ELPA directly from Gnus :-).

This code has already made my life nicer… I installed modes for javascript and CSS (for my js game) on both my machines in a few seconds.

Cool GCC Patch

This is the most intruiging GCC patch I’ve seen for a while. It adds a customizable static checker to GCC, based on the mygcc work. I haven’t read the patch yet, or tried it out, and it went by on the list with little fanfare… much less than it deserves. Static analysis in the compiler has great potential.

Cool Emacs Trick

I looked around for valgrind integration into Emacs recently but I didn’t see anything out there. I had a great idea! — compilation-mode should integrate with shell-mode so I can run valgrind and then next-error will walk through the problems.

Well, it turns out this idea is so great that it has been implemented already. Yay Emacs! Unfortunately the feature is rather obscure; I had to dig around in the source to find it, and it wasn’t obvious that it handled valgrind — it does, but the valgrind error regexp is the same as one for the JVM, so it is misleadingly named “java”.

To enable this, enable compilation-shell-minor-mode in your shell-mode buffer. It will automatically start highlighting the appropriate messages, and mouse-2 will go to the source file.

I’m pretty happy about this idea of using shell mode in this way. It has that nice, integrated, “plastic” feeling I’ve come to associate with the joy of Emacs. I’ve always liked the idea of a “notebook-like” shell, where commands and structured, or even graphical, output are intermixed; this feels a little like that

What’s left? Two things I think… first, Emacs should automatically enable this minor mode when you type “make”, “valgrind”, “ant”, etc, in a shell mode buffer; meanwhile I’m just going to enable this from the mode hook.

Second, I think it would be awesome if running gdb in shell mode somehow auto-started Emacs’ gdb mode. I generally find it a pain to start (but not use) gdb in Emacs, since typically I have a complicated setup on the command line — a particular directory, command line, sometimes an environment; Emacs could simplify this. I wrote a minor mode last night that will recognize when you type “gdb” in the shell and will automatically run it in Emacs instead… I’ll post it soon, or send email if you want it.

CWA

Last week was the Conference on World Affairs. I generally try to make it to a few sessions, but this year it overlapped with other plans. I even missed the movie (Chinatown), though Ebert was out sick, so it probably wasn’t as entertaining as usual.

Still, I did manage to make it to a few of the bigger sessions on Friday.

First I saw Tim Wirth (former senator from Colorado) talk about global warming. Usually this topic depresses me and makes me want to gaze carefully at the several colors of angst. Wirth did a reasonable job of reframing the topic from depression and powerlessness to opportunity. One practical thing he mentioned was getting state legislatures to let local utility companies get the same RoI for efficiency efforts that they do for building new power plants; he said Idaho has the model program here.

After leaving the senate, Wirth stayed involved in politics, pursuing various things, like global warming, that seemed important to him. I wonder what that sort of career must be like.

Next was Joe Biden. He gave what I would describe as a stump speech. I thought he did a pretty good job (he had the best speaking skills of the people I saw), and was even inspiring toward the end. He also answered a bunch of questions; that was pretty interesting. Also, he quotes Seamus Heaney.

Finally came Paul Krugman, giving the Molly Ivins memorial lecture (she was a regular at CWA). He was interesting and entertaining, though I think he didn’t really say much that you couldn’t read in his columns.

In all it was a great way to spend an afternoon; the content was ok, but also just getting out into a non-electronic community for a while was nice. Also I’ve been needing a change of scenery as a way to stretch a bit and reinvigorate my creativity. This helped.

Lost in La Mancha

Elyn doesn’t really enjoy documentaries, so I don’t watch them as often as I’d like. However, Steve and Chrissy came over the other night, and as far as I can tell they only watch documentaries, so we ended up watching Lost in La Mancha.

This movie records Terry Gilliam’s attempt to film his version of Don Quixote. It turns out to be a comedy of errors, and most of the emotional hooks in the movie are laughs at the absurdity of their situation; otherwise the movie failed to connect.

Content-wise what impressed me the most was the seeming lack of knowledge that Gilliam had about his own enterprise. He didn’t know the status of contracts, there was a huge oversight in location choice, etc… I would have liked to have seen more about how these failures came to be.

In sum this was an interesting — but not gripping — behind-the-scenes look at a failed film.

Web App Musings

Recently I’ve been tinkering with my little Javascript game (not quite ready for public release, sorry), and other web apps.

While aspects of Javascript suck, and the platform variance definitely sucks, it is a reasonable language overall. Given current implementations I think it still would not be my language of choice for writing a big application — even my customized Google home page makes the web browser crawl — but I suppose with the commoditization of JIT technology this can be fixed.

Offline access seems like a new frontier for these apps, and I was pleased to read about the Dojo Offline Toolkit via Dan Moore’s blog.

I’m also interested, somewhat independently, in this idea of running applications on local web proxies. I suppose the cool kids all do this kind of thing with greasemonkey instead, though.

Unfortunately web apps seem like a step backward for free software. As far as I know most of the existing ones aren’t really open source — and since in large part they are running on my computer, they really ought to be.

Whither Movies?

Benjamin has been asking me about my mini movie reviews, and I’ve been basically ignoring him.

The sad truth is, the movie situation in Boulder sucks right now. They’re building a new movie theater at 29th Street (which is what replaced the old mall), but it won’t be done for months and months. However, anticipating this, one of the two remaining theaters shut its doors. The theater that is left only plays “art house” movies, which ordinarily aren’t what I’m interested in — I mean, I enjoy them, but in times of flux like this one, I am going to the theater to escape, not to plumb the depths of my ongoing existential crisis. Call me shallow.

IFS is still open but for some reason I never quite manage to read their schedule on time. I’m still hoping to get them to publish an ical feed (I seem to have gotten KGNU to do this… yay!).

When I was sick and couch-ridden a couple weeks ago I tried to watch old Stephen Chow movies. I forced myself through both volumes of Royal Tramp, but couldn’t watch Chinese Odyssey… both of these movies really sucked, I’m sorry to say.

Next week is the Conference on World Affairs, and even though Ebert called in sick, I will probably drop by to watch the movie straight through. They’re showing Chinatown this year — not exactly escapism, but I haven’t seen it on the big screen.

BarCampBoulder Saturday

Saturday I spent at BarCampBoulder.

Going to this event “isn’t really like me”… I generally don’t do that well with groups of people where I don’t know anybody. I did recognize a face or two from the local LUG, but no one I’d actually talked to before. I always feel a bit pulled out of myself in these situations and then, later, spend a lot of time picking apart various discussions and interactions and generally thinking that I’ve been an ass. Bleah.

But, nevertheless, I had fun at BarCamp and I learned a lot as well. It was in an awesome location on West Pearl, sponsored by endoze.com. Excellent coffee was provided by Veloce Coffee.

Most of the folks in attendance did web development, with a fairly large subset running their own companies. I think there was one Java programmer, the rest working mostly in Ruby, it seemed, plus Javascript for the client side. There were also some Python folks and various people who knew PHP, though nobody who claimed to like it.

A long time ago I wrote here about wanting to calendar-ify various places in Boulder, like the public library, KGNU, etc. One of the attendees, Neal McBurnett, is a volunteer at KGNU and so I pestered him about this. Also Dan Moore was interested enough in this, at one point, to have registered a web site for it; so maybe together we can solve this problem. (The KGNU bit looks easy since they seem to use a Python CGI script to register events, and there is a Python library for the Google Calendar API out there.)

I also met Ashish Jain from PingIdentity. He gave a nice rundown on OpenID and CardSpace, and the strengths and weaknesses of both. He also said that Novell recently announced an open source CardSpace client. This talk got me thinking, that it would be nice to have an identity registrar for the open source world, so that I could, for example, make a single account and not have to log in to any bugzilla anywhere. This, I think, could be done with today’s technology. Ashish was extremely knowledgeable. He also pointed us to The Laws of Identity.

There was a session on CMS which was pretty interesting. Folks in attendance have tried most existing major CMS systems. Current favorites are WordPress (for simple sites), Typo3, TextPattern, and Radiant. I also found out about CMS Matrix, another site for letting you compare CMS systems.

Also I found out about Colour Lovers, for all you palette freaks out there. I had some fun browsing here.

We also played a fun game of “half baked”, and I met tons of other people… overall it was great, and I’ll definitely be going to the next one. And, after that, hopefully not feeling like an ass for a change.

Emacs Packages 2

Last night I was energized by BarCampBoulder (I’ll write more about it later, probably tomorrow) and so I hacked on my Emacs Lisp package manager for a while. Check out my page on installing the package manager. Just eval one lisp form and you will be all set up…

Next for this package is some rewriting — changing the archive format, fixing activation a little, and allowing for single-file packages on the server. Also I’m going to write a little tool so I can click on a message in gnu-emacs-sources and have the package automatically uploaded to ELPA.