Marcin Borkowski: Recent Changes

Updates since 2016-11-02 15:12 UTC up to 2016-12-02 15:12 UTC

2016-11-27

11:44 UTC (new) (history) 2016-11-27 Life, productivity, faith . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today’s post is very atypical. It’s been a long time since the last non-technical post, bur here’s another one.

2016-11-19

08:44 UTC (new) (history) 2016-11-19 format-spec . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Last week I was coding something Emacs-y, and felt the need of a format-like function. It would get a string with embedded “control codes”, like %t% or %h, and then output a string with these “control codes” replaced by actual content. Writing something like that is not particularly difficult, but since I wanted to be able to also escape the percent sign by writing %%, I didn’t really feel like reinventing the wheel (and doing it elegantly and efficiently might be a tad tricky anyway). I asked a question on the help-gnu-emacs mailing list, and voilà! Here is the format-spec function.

2016-11-17

2016-11-13

18:54 UTC (new) (history) 2016-11-13 debug-on-entry . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago, I had a very strange problem. I was writing a certain library for Emacs, and in one of the functions I had a Mark set message coming apparently out of nowhere. Since my function used timers, closures and callbacks to do things asynchronously, edebug didn’t help me a lot. Happily, I knew what can give such a message: push-mark. (BTW, this is yet another good reason to have Emacs sources handy: if I hadn’t known that, I could have just grepped the sources.) Now, finding the offending push-mark was a question of five seconds:

2016-11-07

14:28 UTC (new) (history) 2016-11-07 Displaying nonexistent text in Emacs buffers . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago, I received yet another email containing a date in the MM/DD/YY format, which is probably the least reasonable format in existence. (Here in Poland, the customary date format is DD.MM.YYYY, which makes much more sense. Personally, however, I very much prefer the ISO-8601-sanctioned YYYY-MM-DD format.) Since it is quite difficult to deal with date formats one is unfamiliar with, I decided to do something about it.