Recent Changes

2016-08-01

• 20:03 UTC (new) (history) 2016-08-01 Highly sophisticated engineering . . . . Marcin Borkowski – In one of my Emacs libraries, in which I send HTTP requests to a website, I have something like this: (if (string-match "\\?" request) "&" "?") ; this is hackish (the purpose is clear if you know how the URIs are structured). As the comment says, I actually considered this rather a duct-tape approach… …until I found this gem in request.el:

2016-07-25

• 20:36 UTC (new) (history) 2016-07-25 Making directories on the fly . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today, a friend asked me how to create a directory – or a hierarchy of them – while finding a file in a nonexistent directory. I found some clues on the ‘net, but the best one used the old advice mechanism. So I decided to do it myself, based on the hints found. It turned out to be simpler than I thought; it’s made even easier by the fact that Elisp’s make-directory function acts basically like mkdir -p when given non-nil second (optional) argument.

2016-07-18

• 06:40 UTC (new) (history) 2016-07-18 Ledger – virtual postings aka envelopes . . . . Marcin Borkowski – As I mentioned some time ago, I’ve been a ledger user since 2014. Until now, however, I did not really use any of its advanced features. There are a lot of them; the problem is, the manual is not the best one I’ve read. (Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that bad. But while it is a decent manual, it makes a very bad tutorial. Yes, there is a tutorial-like section at the beginning, and it’s nice, it does cover only the very basics.) So I figured out that after almost two and a half years of using Ledger, it’s high time to read the manual again. It turned out that I found one feature I’m probably going to use: virtual transactions.

2016-07-11

• 07:18 UTC (new) (history) 2016-07-11 How to teach oneself properly, or read the manual again in two months . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today I started writing a blog post on Ledger and my experience with it, but I quickly digressed into my way of learning things. Since I guess this might be interesting on its own, I decided to make a separate (albeit short) blog post on this issue. Here’s the gist: my preferred way of learning nowadays consists (roughly speaking) of reading a few tutorials first and skimming the manual, then actually using whatever I’m learning, and then carefully reading the manual.
• 07:16 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2016-07-04 Compiling a single Beamer frame in AUCTeX . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Nice, thanks for sharing! As for refreshing, I use pdf-tools now and say {{{ (add-hook 'TeX-after-compilation-finished-functions . . .

2016-07-04

• 20:44 UTC (new) (history) 2016-07-04 Compiling a single Beamer frame in AUCTeX . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I basically stopped using Beamer. I turned to reveal.js, and did a few presentation in it, using Org-mode’s exporter. That was nice, my slides were not “like anyone else’s” (since everyone and their mother uses Beamer), and even equations worked great thanks to MathJax. Some time ago, I taught a Calculus course (which is a challenge on its own, probably worth a blog post or two, especially that it is not aimed at mathematicians, but geographers – but that’s another story). The slides are very diagram-heavy – you know, all sorts of stuff like tangent lines (since we’re doing derivatives), approximations of arc length or areas (since we’re doing integrals), and occasional cute pictures (since we’re also having fun, or so I hope at least). And it turned out that reveal.js (or at least the Org reveal exporter) really doesn’t like images. And it didn’t let me zoom them. Maybe if I were a CSS wizard, I could make it play nice. But I’m not, and I started missing Beamer, with its very precise control of what goes where. So I came back.

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