Recent Changes

2020-04-27

• 09:39 UTC (new) (history) 2020-04-27 Printing from pdf-tools . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I studied the command-line interface to CUPS. Of course, my goal from the beginning was to use Emacs, not the terminal. It turns out that setting the default printer using lpoptions is not enough for pdf-misc-print-document (bound to C-c C-p in pdf-tools) to work. This command tries first to locate one of three tools for command-line printing: gtklp, xpp and gpr. Frankly, I’ve never heard about any of them, and I just wanted to use lp. This is easy to accomplish – you just need to set the variable pdf-misc-print-programm (sic!) to "lp" and you’re good to go. However, what about my 2-up printing?

2020-04-18

• 12:06 UTC (new) (history) 2020-04-18 The main line of history of some branch . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago, it occurred to me that it would be cool to be able to see the history of some branch of my Git repository – say, develop – but filtered so that I could only see the commits done directly on develop (which do not happen very often) and merge commits indicating that some feature got merged into develop, but without the individual commits. This could then serve as a poor man’s changelog - a list of features committed to develop since e.g. last tagged version.

2020-04-12

• 07:32 UTC (new) (history) 2020-04-12 Easter 2020 . . . . Marcin Borkowski – According to the tradition of my blog, I wish everyone reading this Happy Easter. May the Christ Risen give you His graces every day, and I wish you deep faith in Him. Do not forget that He is stronger than economic crises and physical or mental illnesses. This is no surprise, since He is in fact stronger than something much more serious than that – He defeated all our sins combined. In other words, we have all the right reasons to sing with joy, even if there are also some reasons to cry. As usual, I am going to offer a decade of the Holy Rosary for all my readers. God bless you all!

2020-04-06

• 15:15 UTC (new) (history) 2020-04-06 Printing from the command line . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Recently, I decided that the time has come to go through another geek rite of passage and to learn how to print files from the command line. Being on GNU/Linux, I (of course) use CUPS for printing.

2020-03-28

• 18:40 UTC (new) (history) 2020-03-28 psql as a PostgreSQL teacher . . . . Marcin Borkowski – A week ago, one of the commenters of my post from two weeks ago asked about the way to do stuff like \d (“describe table”) or \l (list the databases) etc. from SQL blocks in Org-mode. Well, the answer is – rather expectedly – “this is PostgreSQL, of course it’s possible”. Here’s how psql can teach you how to do it.

2020-03-23

• 22:14 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2020-03-09 Using Org-mode as a PostgreSQL client . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Hi, thanks for all the comments! I'm very busy now, but I will address them in another post in a week or two -- stay tuned!
• 22:11 UTC (new) (history) 2020-03-23 A rebase trick with disappearing commit . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Today, while working with Git, I discovered a very nice feature. I was working on a dedicated feature branch. Suddenly I discovered a bug which had to be fixed in order for that feature branch to make sense. However, the bug was not really connected with the feature I was working on. Well, it was connected in a sense, but it could affect other things as well, and I decided it should be fixed much earlier than I could possibly finish working on that feature – in other words, it deserved its own branch, based on the develop branch. So, I stashed my work, switched the current branch to develop, created a fixbug branch, fixed the bug, created a merge request and asked a colleague to review it. But here’s the deal: I could not work on my feature without that particular bug fixed. On the other hand, I wanted my feature branch to be based on develop and not on some other, random branch (well, that would work, but I like the history to be as clean as possible). What to do?

2020-03-16

• 20:28 UTC (new) (history) 2020-03-16 COVID-19 . . . . Marcin Borkowski – It seems that everyone is talking about the COVID-19 pandemic now. Well, I decided to jump the bandwagon with a PSA. As all long-time readers of my blog know, it is a small tradition here to offer a decade of Rosary for all my readers on occasions of Easter and Christmas. I figure that a situation of life-endangering pandemic is a perfect opportunity to remember about prayer, so I am going to do the same also today.

2020-03-09

• 08:12 UTC (new) (history) 2020-03-09 Using Org-mode as a PostgreSQL client . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I often have to write more or less complex SQL queries. In case of the easy ones, there is no problem – I just write them and that’s it. With more complex queries, however, it is very useful to adopt an incremental technique – writing them piece by piece. One of the best tools for such “incremental programming” is of course the REPL. In case of SQL (PostgreSQL in my case), this is usually solved with psql. While it has lots of nice features, editing a multiline query within it is not the nicest experience in the world. My first attempt to solving this problem was to use psql​‘s \e command. If given in the line on its own, it launches the default system editor with the previous query. While the readline library used by psql is fine, it is not very helpful in case of long, multiline queries – in such a case, a real editor like Emacs or Vim (or even a toy editor like everything else;-)) seems much better. After some time, however, I had an even better idea.

2020-03-02

• 21:10 UTC (new) (history) 2020-03-02 PostgreSQL on Docker . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Lately, I’ve been experimenting with PostgreSQL a lot. It is of course convenient to be able to set up a temporary database to play around. I didn’t want to do it directly on my laptop. One solution was to use Virtualbox (with Vagrant). This is a nice way, and it is even apparently officially supported. (Go to the linked wiki page to learn about various possible reasons why you might want to run PostgreSQL in a VM.) However, I also wanted to try something different. I am completely new to Docker, and I figured that setting up PostgreSQL in Docker would be a good way to start introducing myself to this technology.

2020-02-24

• 19:44 UTC (new) (history) 2020-02-24 Some psql tips . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I have to admit that I’m more and more enamored by PostgreSQL. Since I often use its default client psql, I started searching the Internet for some features I’d like it to have – and I wasn’t disappointed.

2020-02-15

• 22:39 UTC (new) (history) 2020-02-15 PostgreSQL and null values in jsonb . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Some time ago I was writing some PostreSQL queries involving columns of type jsonb. For some reason I could not understand my query didn’t work as expected. I decided to dig a little bit deeper, and here is what I learned.

2020-02-10

• 19:14 UTC (new) (history) 2020-02-10 My first steps with Lua . . . . Marcin Borkowski – Well, the title of this post is a misnomer – I am already well past my first steps with Lua, since I’ve written a few (admittedly, very simple) Lua scripts. In the near future, though, I’d like to play around with Lua a tad more seriously. (I still do not have a lot of spare time for that, but we’ll see how it goes.) One thing I missed when I tried Lua last time (it could have been a year or so ago) was a feature found in Node.JS’s npm package manager.

2020-02-02

• 08:38 UTC (new) (history) 2020-02-02 Encrypted Org-mode journal . . . . Marcin Borkowski – I use the Org-mode capturing feature to write a daily journal, where I record various important events in the case I’m going to need the information about them. Some time ago it occured to me that encrypting that journal could be a good idea, so I decided to explore that possibility.

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