Wednesday, Nov 6, 2019
I attended the GDG Milwaukee 2019 DevFest last Saturday. This was my second hackathon. Around 6-9 teams participated. We coded for six hours, and I learned a lot about team dynamics. We formed a team of eight participants. We encountered a couple significant challenges.
The stack matters Initially we decided to use Python and the Django framework. This turned out to be a grave error, because picking up Django quickly while staying productive is challenging.
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Friday, Nov 1, 2019
I ran into a hang today with only ivy enabled and nothing else configured or installed. The behavior was such that after I typed a hostname with a TLD (such as not.existant.com1), then typed C-x d to visit a directory or C-x C-f to find a file, Emacs would hang. My mouse would turn into a pin-wheel. My only recourse was to send the ‘quit’ command via C-g to cancel the operation.
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Friday, Aug 2, 2019
Awhile back I noticed my personal mnt/ directory, my (empty) personal tmp/ directory, and a few symbolic links disappeared from my home directory. I only noticed because I use unison1 to synchronize my desktop and laptop homedirs. The actual amount of removed directories and symbolic links were staggering, and it costed me five minutes of extra effort to search through the unison UI to ignore files I don’t want to synchronize.
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Sunday, Jul 28, 2019
On my Gentoo desktops, I use Emacs Daemon via sys-emacs/emacs-daemon1 to ensure an Emacs instance is ready to go and always available from boot. This is done via creating a symbolic link like /etc/init.d/emacs.winston to /etc/init.d/emacs which will start Emacs for the given user. See the package README for more details.
A shortcoming of this setup is XDG_RUNTIME_DIR2 is not set, as this is set by my Desktop Session - maybe LightDM or consolekit set this?
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Tuesday, Jan 22, 2019
As a heavy user of SSH to manage computers and IRC via command line clients, the most used application on my phone besides the web browser is a SSH client. Previously I have used Prompt and it worked, but barely. My issues with Prompt include crashing on emoji spam that is common in certain IRC channels, very slow terminal rendering to the point that watching the output of compiling a large package will cause Prompt to lag uncontrollably for tens of seconds, and a relatively un-intuitive UI.
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Sunday, Jan 13, 2019
No. Do not use it please! There are far easier-to-read and easier-to-use styles for C! 1
Indentation Style on Wikipedia ↩︎
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Friday, Jan 11, 2019
Criteria After reviewing a list of org-mode1 capable static website generators2, I decided to see if org-static-blog3 could suffice my simple needs. My criteria for choosing an org-mode static site generator was:
it must be actively maintained,
it must be simple to set up with customizations,
and it must work with Emacs 26 and later.
This ruled out quite a few right away. I didn’t attempt using org-publish, as it looked like a great deal of configuration to achieve a minimum viable web-page for this project.
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