Recent Changes

2020-06-22

• 21:03 UTC (new) (history) 2020-06-22 lodash iteratee shorthand . . . . mbork – As is widely known, JavaScript is a language with good semantics, not-so-good syntax and a terrible standard library. There are a few modules that aim to help with the last part, and lodash is one of them that I happen to use. It is a very nice thing, but is not necessarily easy to learn for newcomers. One of its nice features is so-called “iteratee shorthand”, mentioned many times in the docs. What is that? Well, Lodash has (among many others) the _.iteratee function. It accepts one argument and returns a function. If the argument is a function, _.iteratee just returns the same function – nothing interesting (and if given null, it returns the identity function). The first interesting thing happens when the argument is a string or an integer.

2020-06-15

• 20:51 UTC (new) (history) 2020-06-15 Emacs, Org-mode, Beeminder and pomodoros . . . . mbork – As some of my readers probably know, I am a happy user of Beeminder, and I even wrote my own Emacs- and Org-based Beeminder client. For some time, I’ve been thinking about somehow incorporating the famous pomodoro technique into my productivity quiver. The problem was, I did know how exactly to do it. Until today.

2020-06-08

• 20:11 UTC (new) (history) 2020-06-08 Emacs as a (very simple) CAT . . . . mbork – From time to time, I need to translate something (usually from English to Polish). Being an Emacs user, I obviously do the typing in Emacs. However, translating – as opposed to writing – has its own set of challenges. One of them is that I need to have two texts on the screen, and track my positions in both. While the “current position” in the active window is clearly marked with the point, this is not that helpful in the “other window” – while the point is visible there, it is usually not very prominent (even if you customize the cursor-in-non-selected-windows variable, which see). You probably expect where this is going to. Yes, I’m going to write such a tool myself.

2020-06-01

• 06:20 UTC (new) (history) 2020-06-01 Node modules working as command-line scripts . . . . mbork – Recently, I wanted to run one Node.JS CLI script from another. Of course, being in a hurry and KISS and whatnot, I decided to just use child_process.execFileSync with node as the first argument, but this is of course grossly inefficient. What if I could write a module usable both from the command line and other code? Well, it turns out that not only is this doable, but actually easy and robust.

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