SBCL 1.2.5 is Available

Posted on 2014-11-02 by jcs

When I set up my new machine, manfredII, I just copied the then current SBCL’s directory from my iMac, aineko, to manfredII and reinstalled the already built binary on the machine. This got me past not having a Lisp compiler available for the initial install.

SBCL 1.2.5 is the first version I’ve built completely on manfredII or under OS X Yosemite for that matters. As always it compiled and passed the tests without problem. I just wish that every software system was as easy to install and maintain.

This month, the development team added support for IPv6 and a module to help with handling Unicode. There was the usual bug fixes as well, although most of those bugs were not something you’d be apt to stumble across.

Let me repeat what I say every month: If you’re looking for a great Common Lisp system to learn from or to use for production, SBCL is an excellent choice.

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A Highbrow Explanation of Why MS Word is Terrible

Posted on 2014-11-01 by jcs

Regular readers know that I have a profound dislike of word processors and especially of Word. I consider it the apotheosis of broken and user-hostile software. To me, Emacs and Org Mode are so far superior that Word would not bear consideration. Even for those situations where someone requires a Doc file, there are a couple of solutions for converting Org to Word (or at least ODT).

Lots of people feel that way, of course, but Edward Mendelson, a professor of humanities at Columbia explains it in a humanities scholar’s way. Word, he says, is a Platonic ideal. Beautiful in its consistency but completely superfluous in the real world. Read the article to see exactly what that means.

He compares Word to the older WordPerfect and finds that WordPerfect, despite not having the elegance of Word, is a much better tool for writing. Sadly, Mendelson, like many of us nerds, is forced to use Word because that’s what the journals demand.

This is a great article and very enjoyable to read. It may give you an understanding of what about Word is so annoying.

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Abusing the Patriot Act

Posted on 2014-10-31 by jcs

Remember how I told you that law enforcement will always abuse surveillance powers? Here’s the latest proof. Despite the solemn promises, less than 1% of sneak-and-peek warrants are actually for terrorism investigations.

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New MELPA URL

Posted on 2014-10-31 by jcs

If you’re a MELPA user you might have heard that the URL for the site has changed. It’s easy to miss the significance of that for your Emacs configuration though. You have to change the package-archives list to reflect the new URL. That is, you have to change 

(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/"))

to 

(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/"))

The old address is still working (it redirects to http://melpa.org) but you should change your configuration before it stops working.

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2600

Posted on 2014-10-30 by jcs

The New Yorker has a nice article about the 2600 magazine. If you’re familiar with 2600, you’ll enjoy reading about the history of magazine and its editor. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s your chance to see why it’s been so influential (at least among a certain segment)for so long.

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Compiling aspell with OS X Yosemite

Posted on 2014-10-30 by jcs

While I was setting up my new machine, I had to rebuild aspell. The last time I did that it built without any problems. This time, despite the fact that it was the same version as before, there were several fatal errors. I asked DuckDuckGo what it knew about the matter and it referred me to this stackoverflow question.

The answer is correct but it’s not very clear where you have to apply the fixes. For the record, the error is in interfaces/cc/aspell.h in the section marked “errors” that starts on line 237. Just comment out the entire section with #ifndef __cplusplus … #endif as lotsoffreetime suggests in the stackoverflow post.

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Common Lisp Notes and Tips on Symbols

Posted on 2014-10-29 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis has updated hit notes and tips on Common Lisp symbols. He’s added cross references and polished it up a bit more. It’s still a work in progress but is useful in its current form.

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vc-annotate Video

Posted on 2014-10-29 by jcs

I’ve written about this before but Aaron Schumacher tweeted a reminder

Avdi’s video really is great and worth mentioning again for anyone who might have missed it. It’s not clear from the video but Avdi is using vc-annotate, which works out of the box for Git even if you usually use Magit.

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Sorry

Posted on 2014-10-28 by jcs

This morning I updated the .htacess file for Irreal in my seemingly never ending efforts to get spam under control. Sadly, while editing the file I hit 【Shift+x o】instead of【Ctrl+x o】and ended up blocking the site.

If you tried and failed to access the site on Tuesday, please accept my apologies.

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Xah Lee on EWW

Posted on 2014-10-28 by jcs

Speaking of eww, Xah Lee has a nice introduction to using EWW. There’s not much to know, really, but Lee has a short FAQ on how to do some of the things that aren’t obvious if you hate to RTFM.

I’ve kicked the tires of EWW but haven’t used it extensively. Some knowledgeable folks, such as Nic Ferrier, think it needs more work but it’s still loads better than what we had before. It’s hard to see how Emacs can ever have a good embedded browser until someone embeds WebKit, or something like it, in Emacs core. There’s been some discussion about that but I’d guess it’s still pretty far off.

In the mean time, EWW is good enough and will probably be an excellent solution for looking up documentation on the Web. I’ve got a lot of that bookmarked in my browser but I can easily see adding a bit of Elisp to bring it up in Emacs instead of having to switch over to the browser.

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