Recent Changes

2020-10-18

• 16:31 UTC (new) (history) 2020-10-18 A nice exercise in metric spaces . . . . mbork – It’s been a very long time since I posted anything math-y here (more than five years!). It certainly has something to do with the fact that I no longer work as a mathematician (even if I am part of one maths-related project, but that’s a secret). A few days ago, however, after a short discussion with a friend, I came up with a really nice exercise. Note: it is not difficult at all, quite the contrary, but I like it a lot.

2020-10-13

• 08:34 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2020-10-12 Editing subtitles in Emacs with subed . . . . mbork – Yep. I did it for my daughter. It's called "true love", you know.

2020-10-12

• 04:58 UTC (new) (history) 2020-10-12 Editing subtitles in Emacs with subed . . . . mbork – Some time ago I bought a DVD with one of my favorite movies of all time. (I am not really a movie person, but I like to watch some film once or twice a year.) Unfortunately, the film is only available in English, and I really wanted my daughter (who doesn’t speak it yet) to watch it with me. I set out to translate all the dialog to Polish (which was quite a challenge, and I am proud to say that I managed to do that – better or worse, sometimes perhaps inevitably worse, but still). Now what I need is to prepare subtitles for the film. It turns out that the industry standard is called srt, and – not that it is surprising – Emacs has a suitable mode.
• 04:56 UTC (new) (history) tpb-subtitles.png . . . . mbork

2020-10-05

• 11:16 UTC (new) (history) 2020-10-05 Notifying the user about the start of the track in EMMS . . . . mbork – I bought a new record a few days ago, and of course the first thing I did was converting it to mp3 files. Then I loaded my new music into EMMS and started listening. And then I noticed a problem – minor but annoying.

2020-09-27

• 19:38 UTC (new) (history) 2020-09-27 Pretty printing SQL queries . . . . mbork – I often work with SQL queries. Sometimes I write them myself, sometimes they are created by an ORM – in either case, they are sometimes pretty long. This means that it would often be nice to have them formatted in a nice way (I mean indentation and line breaks).

2020-09-20

• 10:00 UTC (new) (history) 2020-09-20 A simple trick with Textern and require-final-newline . . . . mbork – I have been using the Textern add-on for Firefox for quite some time now. What it does is it lets you press some key combination while being focused on a textarea element and start editing it in an editor of your choice. Of course, the editor of my choice is Emacs (well actually, Firefox thinks it’s emacsclient, of course). However, there was one thing that annoyed me.

2020-09-14

• 07:46 UTC (new) (history) 2020-09-14 amsreftex – a long-expected package . . . . mbork – I have been a long time user of the amsrefs LaTeX package. I am also an avid fan of the AUCTeX Emacs package. Unfortunately, the two don’t get along very well with each other – AUCTeX has RefTeX, which assumes that the bibliographies are done with BibTeX (and possibly also works with BibLaTeX). This makes RefTeX basically useless for me. And that was the situation until a few days ago.

2020-09-05

• 06:01 UTC (new) (history) 2020-09-05 Better look of the ivy-occur-grep buffer . . . . mbork – Continuing the trend of short tips due to lots of work I have nowadays, here is one thing that bothered me for some time and how I fixed it. I use Ivy and Counsel a lot. One of the functions I have even bound to an easily accessible key is counsel-rg.

2020-08-31

• 16:57 UTC (new) (history) 2020-08-31 When were changes from a specific commit merged . . . . mbork – A situation that happens to me from time to time is when I have a particular commit in my Git repository (often taken from the output of git blame) and I’d like to know when (and with what pull request) it was merged to the main branch (usually develop).
• 06:52 UTC (diff) (history) Comments on 2020-08-24 Sorting object keys with Lodash . . . . mbork – Thanks, I didn't know that!

2020-08-24

• 20:24 UTC (new) (history) 2020-08-24 Sorting object keys with Lodash . . . . mbork – I have been extremely busy recently, so I have only a short tip today. Imagine having a JavaScript object like this: { a: 1, b: 3, c: 2, } and needing to have an (almost) identical object, but sorted by increasing values. (Yes, I know that theoretically the order of object properties does not matter and should not be relied upon, but come on.)

2020-08-17

• 19:39 UTC (new) (history) 2020-08-17 A simple bash one-liner to check a bunch of files for the terminating newline . . . . mbork – Some time ago I had a bunch of csv files in a directory, and some of them had terminating newlines. I wanted to check if every one of them was newline-terminated. After a while of thinking, I came up with this Bash one-liner:

2020-08-10

• 20:53 UTC (new) (history) 2020-08-10 Custom git-log format and a poor man's changelog revisited . . . . mbork – A few months ago I wrote about a “poor man’s changelog” in Git. This post is a short follow-up with another tip on how to make this “changelog” more useful.

2020-08-03

• 14:55 UTC (new) (history) 2020-08-03 Look up a global variable in the database in Node.js . . . . mbork – Today I encountered an interesting problem. Assume that you want a global constant in your Node.js backend, but its actual value is to be taken from a database. This means that fetching the constant should be done asynchronously. Unless you use Node.js 14.3.0 or newer (which as the time of me writing this is not yet ubiquitous), you cannot await your database request at the top level

2020-07-26

• 08:05 UTC (new) (history) 2020-07-26 Running Node.js scripts from the command line . . . . mbork – A few days ago I accidentally ran Node.js from the command line with a wrong argument. I had a script – call it myscript.js – in a directory called myscript. I typed node mys in the directory one level higher, pressed tab and ended up with node myscript/, then pressed enter and got an error (obviously). So, I then cd​‘d into the right directory and (without much thinking) pressed up twice and enter. To my surprise, the script ran. What is going on?

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