Category Archives: Programming

Powerful Regular Expressions Combined with Lisp in Emacs

Posted on 2013-05-16 by

Regular expressions are a powerful text transformation tool. Any UNIX geek will tell you that. It’s so deeply ingrained into our culture, that we even make jokes about it. Another thing that we also love is having a powerful extension … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Emacs, Free software, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Speeding Up Emacs and Parsing Emacs Lisp from Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2013-04-13 by

I recently spent a bit of time to clean up all the cruft that my ~/.emacs file and my ~/elisp directory had accumulated. I have been using a multi-file setup to configure my Emacs sessions, since at least 2008. This … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Emacs, Free software, GNU/Linux, Linux, Lisp, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Saving & Restoring Mate Terminal’s Color-Profile Information

Posted on 2013-03-29 by

Terminal palettes come in infinite variations. Almost everyone has a “favorite” palette, and if you are like me, you probably hate losing all your finely tuned terminal colors, because you wanted to experiment with this new color scheme and forgot … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, GNOME, MATE desktop, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Mutt-like Scrolling for Gnus

Posted on 2013-03-11 by

Mutt scrolls the index of email folders up or down, one line at a time, with the press of a single key: ‘<’ or ‘>’. This is a very convenient way to skim through email folder listings, so I wrote … Continue reading →

Posted in Open source, Programming, Software, GNU/Linux, Free software, Computers, FreeBSD, Emacs, Linux, Gnus, Email | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

sudo hints and ~/.hushlogin in debian or ubuntu

Posted on 2010-11-08 by

My work laptop runs Ubuntu Linux. After using Ubuntu for more than a month now, I can definitely agree that it is a really nice Linux distribution. Most of the things I have to do as part of my every-day … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, GNU/Linux, laptop, Linux, Open source, Programming, Software, Ubuntu | Tagged | 8 Comments

Then vs. Than

Posted on 2010-07-09 by

Scribd has many online books. I try to read at least one book every week. Starting to read a new book is always fun. The sense of anticipation builds up while the search for a new book is still in … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Computers, Γλωσσικά, Programming, Software, Typesetting, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Unit Testing Uncovers Bugs

Posted on 2010-03-09 by

As part of the ‘utility’ library in one of the projects we are using at work, I wrote two small wrappers around strtol() and strtoul(). These two functions support a much more useful error reporting mechanism than the plain atoi() … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Linux, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

Parallel Downloads with Python and GNU Wget

Posted on 2010-01-19 by

GNU wget is a very useful utility that can download files over HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. Downloading a single file from a remote server is very easy. You just have to type: $ wget -np -nd -c -r http://server/path/to/file That’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, Open source, Programming, Software | Tagged , , , , , | 32 Comments

Distributed Development with Mercurial

Posted on 2010-01-11 by

Every clone of a Mercurial repository can act as a consistent, fully functional repository itself. This is a very useful property of a DVCS; one that you can take advantage of to make development a lot easier, especially for teams … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, Mercurial, Open source, Programming, SCM, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Mercurial Clones without a Working Copy

Posted on 2010-01-11 by

Mercurial repository clones can have two parts: An .hg/ subdirectory, where all the repository metadata is stored A “working copy” area, where checked out files may live The .hg/ subdirectory stores the repository metadata of the specific clone, including the … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers, Free software, FreeBSD, Mercurial, Open source, Programming, SCM, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments