Alexander's particulars

Building libiconv on Mac OS X 10.6 x86_64

ncalexan — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:40:49 +0000

So I don’t forget: use this blog.

Barefoot running?

ncalexan — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:21:15 +0000

I read almost all of Born to run last night and it inspired me to run barefoot this morning. My doctor friend suggests that I have Morton’s neuroma so I have been interested in foot problems of late, and am curious to know how it feels. Answer: it feels great. I didn’t run far, but I did try to pay attention to my form and how my feet felt. I stopped when both my achilles tendons tightened and the outside of my hip joints got sore. I will try it again.

I recommend Elliot Smith

ncalexan — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:13:59 +0000

If you’re looking for a gifted songwriter, I highly recommend Elliot Smith. Joel Dodge, a fellow participant at the Utah math camp on L-functions in June/July, put me onto Smith. I like Either/Or, but his later (more accessible) Figure 8 is truly special.

Happy listening!

jQuery nextOf/prevOf plugin

ncalexan — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:18:35 +0000

I’m hardly a web 2.0 guru, but the following jQuery tidbit makes it easy to move forward/backward in the DOM. I use it like $('.input').nextOf('.input').focus().

(function($){ $.fn.prevOf = function(selector, options) { var defaults = { }; var options = $.extend(defaults, options);


	var t = $(selector);

	var i = t.index($(this).eq(0));

	if (i > -1)

		return t.eq(i-1);

	return this;

}
})(jQuery);
(function($){

    $.fn.nextOf = function(selector, options) {

	var defaults = { };

	var options = $.extend(defaults, options);
	var t = $(selector);

	var i = t.index($(this).eq(0));

	return t.eq(i+1);

}

})(jQuery);

International coffee shop ratings

ncalexan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:02:08 +0000

Today we review Calhoun’s. Catriona likes her coffee (a vat sized mug); I like my Americano (a discrete 12oz mug). The music has been mixed, including the Ice Cream Truck song at one point. I immediately rated my chair a 2/10 on the comfort scale. It’s spacious; there are plenty of plugs; when the wind picks up, there is a veritable gale blowing the sunshine out of the establishment. The wireless password is coldbeer, which they offer on tap; at night, there’s live music. It doesn’t have the cozy chic feel of my favorite places, but I give it 8/10.

Spellchecking sage source

ncalexan — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:41:13 +0000

The emacs command ispell-comments-and-strings is not perfect (it checks the code of doctests, for example) but it is pretty good.

Thoughts on being sage release manager

ncalexan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:15:20 +0000

In no particular order:

Having two release managers is very beneficial. Craig and I chatted for most of yesterday, getting help with all the little problems along the way. What’s even better is that you can constantly vent your frustrations as you learn an awful lot about a process you probably don’t care much about.
The sage release process isn’t exactly smooth — but it’s not awful either. I feel it’s like the IRS 1040 form: you dread doing it, but it’s not actually that awful, and at the end you can’t think of obvious ways to expedite the process. (Actually, I submit the 1040NR-EZ form.) The sage build scripts just work, at least most of the time.
Bitrotten patches are really deflating. When it comes time to try to merge and close a ticket, a patch that doesn’t apply — even for the most trivial of reasons — is a real kick in the teeth for the release manager. Every patch that doesn’t merge cleanly forces you to make a decision: fix it yourself or punt. The right answer is punt, but it never feels right.
The trac server and the list are fine for high level coordination, but IRC is superior for actually doing stuff, and talking to Craig on the phone beat both.

Make emacs load .spkg files like .tar.gz files

ncalexan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:39:02 +0000

Add the following to your .emacs:
;; the following makes .spkg files load automatically (add-to-list 'jka-compr-compression-info-list '["\\.spkg" "" "" nil "unspkging" "bunzip2" ("-c" "-d") t nil "BZh"]) (jka-compr-update) (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.spkg$" . tar-mode))

sage release manager for a week…

ncalexan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:31:37 +0000

Craig Citro and I are playing sage release managers for a week. (Unfortunately, there are no paper hats. None whatsoever.) Sage 4.0.2 is intended to drop Saturday, June 13.

Since neither Craig nor I have much experience managing sage, I am going to make some notes here.

Things to be done:

Tag the hg repository.
sage -clean?
Update the version number.
Update the release notes (with Minh).
Update the website (with Harald).

Now back to upgrading mpir.

Updating wordpress.com blogs from emacs using weblogger.el

ncalexan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:10:18 +0000

A netizen called jwickers made some small fixes to the emacs package weblogger.el.

Another netizen named ciju has a nice discussion of the fixes made by jwickers, and adds his own workflow changes.

Both these packages are running smoothly for me right now, although I’ve used only the most basic functionality. It’s a little annoying that one has to replace xml-rpc.el (a package distributed with vanilla-but-new emacs), but I’m cautiously optimistic that the changes will be merged upstream sometime.