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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Duplicating a Line in Emacs

Posted on 2014-10-27 by jcs

I don’t need to duplicate a line often enough to make this worthwhile for me but it’s a nice solution and worth considering if you find yourself duplicating lines a lot.

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Compiling Emacs with eww on OS X

Posted on 2014-10-27 by jcs

I’m old school and like to compile applications myself rather than use something like Homebrew. I have nothing against Homebrew and its brethren, it’s just that compiling things myself helps me stay connected to the development process. Besides, it’s what real geeks do. One consequence of this is that I compile Emacs from source rather than downloading the prebuilt binaries.

I compiled Emacs 24.4 recently and didn’t experience any problems until I tried to use eww. Emacs told me that it had to be compiled with libxml2 to use eww. After a bit of investigation, I discovered that libxml2 was not installed with OS X so I downloaded and compiled it and rebuilt Emacs. Sadly, it still didn’t compile with libxml2. I could see from config.log that configure wasn’t finding the include files for the library. That’s because they installed in /usr/local/include rather than in /usr/include.

After a bit more fumbling around, I discovered the proper spell. If you’re trying to compile Emacs on a Mac and want it to build with libxml2, here it is. 

configure --with-ns CFLAGS="-I /usr/local/include/libxml2"
make
make install
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