Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

After my midterms, I will be at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines to participate in the Software Freedom Day celebration. We will be having demos and talks on FOSS, CD distributions and burn fest, and a keysigning party afterwards.

So, fellow Filipinos and hackers: see you there!

I’ve finished packaging ECB for Debian, and am now looking for a sponsor.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m almost done in packaging the new upstream version of ecb for Debian. I’ve managed to kill three open bugs, and I think a couple of the remaining bugs are assigned to the wrong package. I’ve yet to test the last bug as I seem to be hitting a snag when I byte-compile ecb upon installation, forcing me to abandon using the supplied Makefile and adapt from the old emacsen-install script using batch-byte-compile instead. Ucf doesn’t seem to work too, since it doesn’t install /usr/share/$FLAVOUR/site-lisp/ecb/ecb-init.el to /etc/$FLAVOUR/site-start.d/55ecb-init.el; maybe I’m missing something.

I hope I can post an RFS for this on debian-mentors tomorrow…

Things I’m doing/did (in no particular order):

• Started my own emacs-wiki branch in GNU Arch, which can be found in my archive. I picked up tla a few days ago, and later I found myself getting Xtla for Emacs and integrating my recent note-anchor patches into my own branch. My next goal: get nested lists to work.
• Signified ITA to Debian ecb which was recently orphaned by Joerg Jaspert. Will be working on an update by next week, as I’m currently busy completing schoolwork.
• Finished my Natural Science I assignment today, and now yak shaving prior to completing my Philosophy 1 assignment. I should be submitting these before the 13th, as that will be the day I will be back in Manila for my second study session at UP Diliman. Even as the requirements become increasingly difficult for me to follow, distance education simply rocks! (Thanks to PlannerMode and the Hipster PDA
• Submitted my 2 talk abstracts for the upcoming LinuxWorld Philippines conference: an introduction to Emacs and a bit of document typesetting with LaTeX.

I think I still need to master this blogging thing…

Clair and I just chatted today over YM, and from her personal blog I saw her contemplating on learning a programming language. I suggested that she learns either Python, or (Emacs) Lisp. On the other hand, I could also suggest (judging from the comments on her post) that she could also dig in to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman, just as I’m doing now.

The book, in itself, doesn’t teach Lisp (actually it’s smaller, leaner brother, Scheme) per se: rather, it focuses on the actual process of programming, including the study of computational processes, visualizing its local evolution through abracadabra programming, and general hints on abstraction and programming paradigms. I know, it sounds heavy (even more so with a bit of (lambda) Calculus included but there is actually a great lot of concepts to be found in this book, I myself even wonder why I didn’t read this, at the first place (judging from my past Net wanderings, I’ve already passed SICP at least thrice, on different occasions).

What even makes me wonder more is that I wasn’t even being aware of learning Lisp, as it subtly inserts itself at every place it needs to be, when you need a procedure definition handy, or when the book illustrates the concepts. I don’t even need to pay attention to syntax (as far as Lisp goes, Scheme’s the most intuitive, especially in its treatment of procedures as `first-class’ objects), so it rather goes into fine-tuning the inner workings of crafting really great computational processes that follow nice shapes, and in turn flows into the actual implementation of the process as a written program.

Oh, I could go on and on praising this book… but, well, you’ve got eyes, right (and if by chance you don’t, there are text-to-speech readers available), so go get a copy and read it! And if you can afford downloading large files, you can get the video lectures too…

Simply point your feed aggregator somewhere that’s not dangerous, and help yourself.

Now, let me contemplate on working an Emacs-Lisp-powered semantic personal publishing system with spam-fighting comment support, PlannerMode capabilities and Emacs-Lisp manipulexity.

Clair: Yeah! Same here too, just got my email, I was beginning to worry about it. I also saw Sacha and Dong Calmada among the participants as well.

Yeah, I also changed the layout to WP1.5-classic. I’m considering whether to get a theme from Alex King or hack on the classic, as the Lisp title above suggests.

And yes, I’m going ga-ga over Lisp, too So much that I haven’t been seriously writing prose or blog-content, just real Lisp code. Come to think of it, learning Lisp has such an impact on me that I’m starting to write in reverse, like what you see in front of an ambulance…

Update: Now on clasikue, by freak.

I’ve been busy since Easter morning, taking a cue from dotemacs.de on modularizing my .emacs . So far, so good, there wasn’t any breakage, and at the same time it was a good way to practice my learning of Emacs Lisp. All the same, it’s not perfect yet, as some simple things need resolving. You can take a look at it too if you’re interested.

Clair: Yep, its quite easy to switch from LILO to GRUB, just follow the instructions at /usr/share/doc/grub/README.Debian, and in particular you can integrate GRUB onto `kernel-package’-built kernels’ installations. As for kernel baking, Manoj Srivastava’s text on /usr/share/doc/kernel-package/README.gz is the better text to read, along with the kernel docs. In a nutshell, though:

$ cd <linux-source-dir>
$ make <config-method>
$ make-kpkg clean
$ make-kpkg -rfakeroot -rev 1 kernel-image
$ MODULE_LOC=<modules-outside-linux-source-directory> make-kpkg -rfakeroot -rev 1 modules-image
$ sudo dpkg -i ../kernel-image-<kernel-revision>_<your-rev>_<your-arch>.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i ../<outside-modules>-<kernel-revision>_<your-rev>_<your-arch>.deb
$ sudo shutdown -r now

You better install fakeroot too.

I’ve also updated my del.icio.us tags.

Yesterday I fetched the Emacs CVS sources, then built with GTK support. It definitely rocks! Screenshot soon…

I’ve also migrated Gnus, ERC, emacs-wiki and PlannerMode to their respective development versions. I’ve had a time setting them up so that they load first before the Debian equivalents; the following elisp takes care of this:

;; This lets me load my own elisp libs in front of Debian startup elisps
(mapcar '(lambda (f)
	   (and (not (string= (substring f -3) "/.."))
		(file-directory-p f)
		(add-to-list 'load-path f)))
	(directory-files "~/elisp" t))