Recent Changes

2016-05-17

• 17:49 UTC (new) (history) 2016-05-17 Emacs Lisp closures demystified . . . . Marcin Borkowski – It is often claimed that one of the advantages of closures (as in “lexical scoping”) is information hiding (a.k.a. encapsulation). This is true, but as this post shows, you can’t really hide anything in Emacs Lisp;-).

2016-05-15

• 04:40 UTC (new) (history) 2016-05-15 debug-on-whatever . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Debugging Elisp is sometimes tricky. Some time ago I had an issue with a variant of show-paren-mode. The issue looked like a complete hang of Emacs, when even C-g didn’t help. How to debug that?

2016-05-12

• 05:39 UTC (new) (history) 2016-05-12 Make yourself known – summary . . . . Marcin Borkowski – So it’s over. I thought that a nice way of finishing the series of posts related to the contest would be some information about my work during the past two and a half months. So, let’s begin.

2016-05-10

• 04:30 UTC (new) (history) 2016-05-10 Preserving the drawing during screen rotation . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A rather annoying “feature” of Android is the fact that screen rotation causes recreating the current activity from scratch. While this is quite reasonable, it has an undesired side effect: most data are lost. (What is left is the state of widgets having an id.) In Logeox, this is not what I would like to have: if I rotate my phone (and that might happen by accident!), all my drawings are erased. The problem is: what do I do with it? Quite surprisingly, the solution seems far from obvious. After about an hour of reading and experiments, here’s what I learned and did.

2016-05-04

• 06:09 UTC (new) (history) 2016-05-04 UI considerations again – undo . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As you might have guessed, I pay siginificant attention to UI/UX issues. Since I’ve been implementing undo functionality recently, I thought I’d share a fwe thoughts about it. On the surface, undo seems easy: you record all changes you have made and revert the last one on demand. When you look at details, however, things can get messy.

2016-05-03

• 03:31 UTC (new) (history) 2016-05-03 All clear . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Well, the title of this post does not mean (unfortunately) that I’ve overcome all my design/coding problems (not to mention my life problems…) – it’s just a lame pun relating to the “clear the screen” feature.

2016-05-02

• 07:25 UTC (new) (history) 2016-05-02 Storing commands again . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Two posts ago I wrote about my struggle with the TurtleCommand class. Well, it seems the struggle is over. I’m now in the process of implementing commands, and so far it seems to work fine.

2016-04-30

• 18:27 UTC (new) (history) 2016-04-30 Layout rehaul . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I wrote about some ideas for a better layout. First of all, I wanted a switch for pen up/pen down; and while at that, I decided that I might as well change my Buttons into ImageButtons and draw some icons for turtle movement. Boy, was it fun!

2016-04-28

• 18:02 UTC (new) (history) 2016-04-28 A problem with storing commands . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I knew that at some point I’d hit some wall… Of course, I will overcome this issue, but right now I feel quite lost. Here’s the thing: I want to be able to store some commands for the turtle (like “first go forward 5 times, then turn right 2 times, then go forward 1 times” etc.). I already know how to use an ArrayList or similar structures, but what should I store there?

2016-04-26

• 19:34 UTC (new) (history) 2016-04-26 fill-single-char-nobreak-p . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Since Emacs 24 (or so), Polish-speaking users got a very nice gift: a function called fill-single-char-nobreak-p, which can be put into fill-nobreak-predicate. It prevents Emacs from breaking a line after a one-letter word when filling, which is a rule in Polish typography. Of course, when writing in LaTeX, it doesn’t matter at all, since then you use ties (tildes) to prevent breaks anyway (and there is an Emacs library called sierotki.el, which means “little orphans” in Polish, to insert those ties automatically). When writing emails (with hard line-breaks), however, this is a very useful thing.

2016-04-24

• 06:09 UTC (new) (history) 2016-04-24 The conditional-save-excursion macro . . . . Marcin Borkowski – One day I was writing a library of helper functions for writing messages (I will definitely share them in due time!). One of the things there is (semi-)automatic insertion of salutations and closings. You know, all this “Dear Sir/Sincerely yours” stuff which is basically meaningless (and harmful in term of time spent – on both sides of the wire!) in an email, but many people expect it anyway. I am now in the process of moving to shorter email messages. This is one of the signatures I might recommend – based on http://two.sentenc.es Q: Why is this email so extremely laconic and has no courtesies? A: Because our time is more valuable than our egos. http://two.sentenc.es And one of my goals is to insert such a signature automatically, with the proper sentence count. By the way, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for “slow life”, and not succumbing to the rat race and the “do everything as fast as you can so you can take on even more insane amount of work”. But since the time I’ve been trying to measure time I spend on various things (and optimize it), I noticed that email handling takes up a considerable amount of my time. And even if automating writing emails seems not really worth the time spent on coding it, the linked table does not take into account two factors: first, if I share my code with others, the savings are basically multiplied by the number of people using the code (without the overhead of them coding it!). Then, it is not only the time which is involved: even if do not really save time (because of all time spent on coding), I have some fun doing it, I constantly larn something along the way, I share what I have learned and coded, and I remove the frustrating part from email writing. Coming back. When I launch an Emacs command to insert or change the salutation, I usually wouldn’t want to get distracted, so I don’t want the point to move. The save-excursion form is made for such a purpose. OTOH, sometimes I might want to edit the salutation (e.g., add a name to it). In such a case, I do not want save-excursion.

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