Recent Changes

2019-10-12

• 11:58 UTC (new) 2019-10-12 Challenge accepted - a Node.js grep . . . . Marcin Borkowski – An old friend of mine posted a challenge on Twitter to implement a grep-like utility in one’s language of choice. Instead of complaining that he’s got an unfair advantage – he is a Pythonista, and Python is almost as well-suited to that kind of tasks as Perl – I decided to accept the challenge. Of course, I had to start with Emacs Lisp.
• 11:53 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Yep, I tried to be comprehensive. :-)

2019-10-11

• 08:45 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . ruanda – I didn't see you mentioned -b already ;)
• 08:43 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . ruanda – {{{ $ diff -ub a b --- a 2019-10-11 10:40:06.023072617 +0200 +++ b 2019-10-11 10:40:13.254971828 +0200 @@ -1,4 +1,6 @@ -module.exports = { . . .

2019-10-07

• 20:23 UTC (new) 2019-10-07 A tip with diffing (and committing) program structure changes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As I mentioned last week, the fact that diff works on a line basis is sometimes a source of trouble. Consider this case. Assume that we have a simple JavaScript module greets (I guess that a very similar case could be made for Java classes, Python modules etc.).

2019-09-30

• 20:33 UTC (new) 2019-09-30 diff and ignoring lines . . . . Marcin Borkowski – One of the most well-known commandline tools is the classical diff program. On my system, it is (of course) the GNU diff, which is a part of the GNU diffutils package. Recently, I found out that GNU diff has an interesting option, -I (or --ignore-matching-lines). You can give it a regex and it will ignore added or deleted lines if they contain a match for this regex. This may be useful in many circumstances.

2019-09-23

• 18:44 UTC (new) 2019-09-23 A comparison between merging and rebasing . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Many Git tutorials and howtos discuss the question whether you should merge or rebase your branches on the master branch when ready to include some feature in your code. What they usually do not mention is that rebase may be trickier to perform than merge. Why is that so? Let’s dive in and see.

2019-09-16

• 15:30 UTC (new) 2019-09-16 sponge and other moreutils . . . . Marcin Borkowski – GNU coreutils are well-known and loved, especially with pipes (of course!). But what may be slightly less known is the collection of command-line tools called moreutils. As their author says, moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.

2019-09-08

• 20:41 UTC (new) 2019-09-08 PostgreSQL and computing the number of days between two dates . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few days ago I had a very interesting bug. (Frankly, it’s nothing to be proud of, but it’s interesting and also kind of funny, so I thought I’d share it.) I had a long PostgreSQL query which – as one of many conditions – checked if some date was more than two weeks in the future.
• 20:37 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-08-05 datefudge and agenda testing . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Exactly - but I think {{{datefudge}}} may be more robust.
• 20:36 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-06-24 org-agenda-todo-ignore-timestamp vs org-agenda-todo-ignore-with-date . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I know, but I was too lazy to explore it;-).
• 20:35 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-01-20 Filling and version control . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Interesting, thanks!
• 20:35 UTC (diff) Comments on 2019-08-31 A simple tip with overlays and diffs . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Thanks, but not. It solves a different problem - it goes to the next hunk, and I wanted to go to the next change even /within/ the current hunk.

2019-09-03

• 12:33 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-08-31 A simple tip with overlays and diffs . . . . npostavs – What about `smerge-next'? {{{ smerge-next is an interactive compiled Lisp function in ‘smerge-mode.el’. It is bound to <menu-bar> . . .

2019-08-31

• 11:17 UTC (new) 2019-08-31 A simple tip with overlays and diffs . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A few days ago I had an interesting problem. I had to resolve a particlarly nasty Git merge. It involved several files with lines’ lengths in the triple digits and a fair number of very small changes. Seeing those changes (in smerge-mode), even after refining the diffs, was tricky – there were many very small patches (sometimes two, sometimes four characters) of changed text and I was quite afraid that I would miss some of them. I searched for a command to “go to the next patch of changes”, but to no avail. Then I decided to write my own.

2019-08-26

• 20:42 UTC (new) 2019-08-26 PostgreSQL – COALESCE and NULLIF . . . . Marcin Borkowski – After the last week’s long post I decided that I needed some rest, so today I only have a short tip. It is a common need to say that we want the value of some variable x unless it is some kind of null value (depending on the language we use), in which case we want the value of some other variable y. The Lisp idiom for that is of course (or x y). In JavaScript, we usually say x || y, although this is risky if 0 is a valid value of x. (Hopefully, we will be able to say x ?? y in JS soon.) In my case, however, I needed this in SQL (more specifically, in PostgreSQL, but that doesn’t matter now).

2019-08-19

• 20:56 UTC (new) 2019-08-19 Transplanting a directory to another Git repository . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Recently, I had a very specific need. I wanted to move a directory to another Git repo, but I really needed to preserve its history.

2019-08-15

• 05:29 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-06-24 org-agenda-todo-ignore-timestamp vs org-agenda-todo-ignore-with-date . . . . Anonymous – org-ql makes this sort of thing much easier to do. :)
• 05:23 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-08-05 datefudge and agenda testing . . . . Anonymous – I do this in the test suite for org-super-agenda. It's very simple and allows using any date. See . . .

2019-08-11

• 19:18 UTC (new) 2019-08-11 A console.dir hint . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As everyone knows, console.log is the ultimate debugging tool. ;-) Joking aside, it is genuinely useful (together with console.error) in scripts. I often write small (and sometimes not so small) CLI utilities in Node.js, and they are really indispensable. Sometimes, however, you want to output a complicated structure.
• 16:13 UTC (new) Comments on 2019-01-20 Filling and version control . . . . yantar92 – You may also take a look at centered-window-mode.

2019-08-05

• 17:04 UTC (new) 2019-08-05 datefudge and agenda testing . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago, a question was asked on the Org-mode mailing list about a specific kind of task in Org agenda. This made me think about debugging one’s agenda settings. I’ve already written about batch agenda, but one problem with agenda testing is that it is inherently stateful, in one of the worst ways – it depends on the notion of now. Debugging time-related stuff is hard. (Well, time-related stuff is hard, after all.) It would be great if you could just manipulate Emacs into thinking that the time is some day in the future (or in the past)… Well, actually, it can be done – and it’s easier than I thought.

2019-07-29

• 18:29 UTC (new) 2019-07-29 Git commands as separate executable files . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today we are going to talk about git commands and how they are implemented. Don’t worry, I won’t get too technical – if only I have not studied Git sources (I do not speak C well enough for that anyway). It is enough for us to read the manpage of the git command itself (which I did, along with some experimentation).

2019-07-22

• 18:43 UTC (new) 2019-07-22 Increasing timeout in nginx . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today’s is a short follow-up to the post about debugging Node.js programs in a Vagrant virtual machine. It turns out that it lacked one important piece. It’s all and good in an artificial environment of an isolated script – but when we debug a real Node.js application, the server will timeout while we are slowly stepping through code.

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