Alex Ott's blog

clojure class compilation...

2009-10-28T11:00:00.004+01:00

just not to forget: when trying to compile clojure source, be sure, that `pwd`/classes is in your CLASSPATH!

2009-10-16T12:40:00.003+01:00

Several days I started to play with Clojure for one of my pet projects. After several days of use, I can say, that it's pretty good choice, as I have access to library-rich JVM from one side, and I can develop programs interactively, using Emacs + Slime (about customization of Slime for Clojure I'll write some time later - it not finished yet)

Second Issue of Russian FP Journal

2009-09-28T09:22:00.006+01:00

The second issue of "Practice of Functional Programming" Journal (in Russian) was released today. This issue contain several articles about use of functional languages in "industrial" software development, including my article about development of "Dozor-Jet" - set of software products for data leak prevention, and compliance...
You can also discuss this issue at LiveJournal....

2009-08-25T20:11:00.001+01:00

A Friend of mine (well known in Russian Lisp/Emacs community) had created a blog in English, mostly for articles about Common Lisp & Emacs, so if you interested, you can subscribe to it...

Functional Programming & Microsoft

2009-08-18T15:43:00.001+01:00

Small presentation about "Why MS trying to adopt functional programming in their programming languages...

books

2009-08-14T09:27:00.002+01:00

Several days ago I finished reading of Code Complete, 2nd edition - I heard about this book several times, but hadn't time to read before.
From my point of view, this is very useful book - there are many hints about software development, especially for the junior developers. For me, many hints are obvious, but I remember, that I spent much time to figure them out myself.
There are also much information about improving of software development process, including links to books about software architecture, organization of software development process, testing, and so on. And there are also lot statistical information about usage of concrete development & testing methods...

First release of russian magazine about functional programming

2009-07-21T09:36:00.002+01:00

I'm very happy to announce, that we released first issue of magazine about functional programming in Russian language, called "Practice of functional programming".
In this issue we collected articles dedicated to introduction to functional programming paradigm...

2009-06-20T19:21:00.002+01:00

2 month ago i spent my vacation at Tenerifa, Spain - and only now i found time to upload some photos to Picasa. I tried to select best photos (from my point of view) - I experimented with my Nikon D60 & tripod, trying to get photos at nights, etc.
Here is some photos, other are available at Picasa & Yandex Photo (with Russian interface only):

From 2009. Tenerife

Just finished reading of Real World Haskell

2009-06-14T20:37:00.002+01:00

Several minutes ago I finished reading of Real World Haskell book. This beautiful book, containing very good description of Haskell, and practical aspects of it's usage for programming.
I also prepared my first package to upload to Hackage...

Muse + bibtex -> HTML output

2009-05-25T10:42:00.000+01:00

I slightly hacked Muse to add support for bibliography generation in HTML output. First (very naive, but working) version is available from my repository at github

New version of ECB package

2009-05-16T20:17:00.002+01:00

After 4 years of development, the new versions of ECB package was released. There are lot of changes, now ECB requires fresh version of Cedet package, as it uses many new features of it, including support for EDE projects.

Continue to upgrade my iMac

2009-04-27T12:27:00.002+01:00

After almost 2 years of work on Intel iMac 20", I decided to upgrade it partially. Two month ago I increase memory from 2Gb to 3Gb (this is maximal amount, available for this model), and last Saturday I replaced hard disk in it (from 250Gb to 1Tb - Samsung Spinpoint with 32Mb of disk cache).
Upgrade took several hours - first, I cloned old disk to new one, with Carbon Copy Cloner (standard disk utility hadn't work well), and then I replace hard disk inside iMac - this step took about 40 min. - I took off LCD screen to get access to system board where hard disk is installed. And after assembling, all started to work without any problems and questions.
I'm very satisfied with selected hard disk - it's silent, and provide very good performance, comparing with old WD

Linux-related

2009-04-19T14:29:00.003+01:00

Last friday I switched my work desktop computer from 32-bit Ubuntu to 64-bit Debian Lenny (to be in sync with other members of our development team). As I had second hard disk in my computer, migration was very easy - I restored all my personal configurations in half hour.
After work with Ubuntu, it was novel to find, that stable repository has very old packages (testing also not so fresh), so I already backported some of packages from unstable. But I don't plan to swithc to unstable completely.
P.S. I almost broke my brain, trying to figure out, why git cann't see repositories on the usb flash disk. After some googling, I found, that debian & ubuntu have different default mount options. I added the shortname=mixed to mount options, and all started to work fine.

Back from vacation

2009-04-09T12:10:00.002+01:00

I returned from vacation 2 days ago. Change of environment, allows to get rid of winter's fatigue. Besides of swimming, sunbathe on the beach, and taking a walk across the Puerto de La Cruz, I also spent a lot of time reading a set of papers, that I wanted to read long time ago, but hadn't time to read. This includes number of papers on Haskell (History of Haskell, Typeclassopedia, Tackling awkward the Squad, etc.), LLVM, Information Retrieval, and also half of "Programming Collective Intelligence" book.
P.S. and dozen of sci-fi books of different authors ;-)
P.P.S. when reading these papers, i often thinks about buying a e-ink based book reader, but 10" models (size, that allows me to read PDFs) still too expensive :-(

GNU Emacs 23, Mac OS X and fonts

2009-03-21T10:49:00.003+01:00

After several weeks, had rebuilt theл GNU Emacs from CVS and start to work with it under Mac OS X. In latest builds, use of anti-aliased fonts is disable by default, so text looks very bad :-( In mailing list i got a hint about the ns-antialias-text variable (not available via customize), that should be set to non-nil value, and than anti-aliased fonts will enabled, like in Carbon Emacs.

Small addition to sh-mode

2009-03-06T09:55:00.002+01:00

Below is piece of code, that could be useful for all, who write shell scripts in Emacs. It provides sh-check-syntax function, that performs syntax checking (currently only for sh/bash/zsh) and navigation between errors, if they found. It's better to bind this function to some key (i use C-c l)

(defun sh-check-finish-hook (buf msg)
 "Function, that is executed at the end of sh check"
 (when (not (string-match "finished" msg))
   (next-error 1 t)))

(define-compilation-mode sh-check-mode "SH"
 "Mode for check sh source code."
 (set (make-local-variable 'compilation-disable-input) t)
 (set (make-local-variable 'compilation-scroll-output) nil)
 (set (make-local-variable 'compilation-finish-functions)
      (list 'sh-check-finish-hook))
 )

(defun sh-check-syntax ()
 "Check syntax of current file"
 (interactive)
 (when (string-match "^\\(ba\\|z\\)sh" (symbol-name sh-shell))
   (save-some-buffers t)
   (compilation-start (concat (symbol-name sh-shell) " -n " (buffer-file-name))
                      'sh-check-mode))
 )

New Cedet pre-release

2009-03-01T10:56:00.002+01:00

After almost two years since previous pre-release, Eric M. Ludlam released today a new pre-release version of Cedet - 1.0pre6. This version includes numerous additions of new features, and fixes.

New version of Squid-GSB utility

2009-02-27T19:06:00.002+01:00

Right now I released new version of the Squid-GSB utility (version 0.2), that allows to use Google Safe Browsing API database together with Squild. In new version i did following changes:

CMake is used to configure and build - this allows to implement more correct detection of Boost libraries;
correct handling of Transfer-Encoding: chunked is implemented;
source repository is moved to GitHub;
documentation is updated

New version you can also download from my site.

Emacs + Haskell + Pretty lambda

2009-02-17T11:34:00.003+01:00

Do you know, that if you set the haskell-font-lock-symbols variable to t, in the haskell-mode hook, then your source code will look as on following picture:

P.S. some symbols aren't included into standard package, but patch is already sent to author of haskell-mode...

Cedet + Qt

2009-02-13T14:46:00.010+01:00

On one of the Russian forums I was asked "Why Cedet doesn't work with Qt?" Answer is very simple - it works, but you need to make simple customization. Add following code into your initialization file, and Cedet begin to parse your code:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
'("/usr/include/qt4" . c++-mode))
(semantic-add-system-include 
"/usr/include/qt4" 'c++-mode)
(add-to-list 'semantic-lex-c-preprocessor-symbol-file
"/usr/include/qt4/Qt/qconfig.h")
(add-to-list 'semantic-lex-c-preprocessor-symbol-file
"/usr/include/qt4/Qt/qconfig.h")

Here is proof:

Thanks to Eric M. Ludlam for hint about semantic-lex-c-preprocessor-symbol-file variable.
Update (12/05/2009): It seems, that this approach will not work in fresh CEDET - I'm working on fix

Small article about Cedet

2009-02-13T14:07:00.002+01:00

I wrote small article, called "A Gentle introduction to Cedet" about how to install & use the Cedet package. I hope, that this article will help Emacs users to get information about this wonderful package.
You can write comments and suggestions about article in comment widget at the end of page (JavaScript should be enabled).
P.S. i know that there are grammatical errors in my article, please write your comments at the end of the page, or via mail/jabber directly to me.

Second version of the hs-lint package

2009-02-08T14:07:00.002+01:00

Just updated hs-lint, so it now allows to perform replacements of user's code with hints, produced by HLint. To use this feature, you need to set hs-lint-replace-with-suggestions variable to t, and than after execution of the hs-lint command you'll asked for confirm replacement each of hint, found by HLint. And if you'll set the hs-lint-replace-without-ask variable to t, then all replacement will be done without confirmation.
New version is available from my site.

cedet + boost::shared_ptr

2009-02-07T17:17:00.002+01:00

Eric Ludlam committed to CVS changes, that fix errors in names completion for objects, wrapped into boost::shared_ptr. Now all works fine, and I able to use Emacs more effectively, when I work with foreign code (usually for my code, i remember all functions ;-)
For other smart pointers this feature already existed, the problem was only in parsing of shared_ptr's definition.
P.S. I started to translate to English my introduction level article about Emacs & Cedet usage for work with C & C++ code...

Running HLint from Emacs

2009-01-11T15:29:00.004+01:00

I wrote small module for more comfortable work with HLint from Emacs. It has same functionality as compilation-mode - navigation between errors, etc.
To use it, just add following code to emacs init file:
(require 'hs-lint)
(defun my-haskell-mode-hook ()
(local-set-key "\C-cl" 'hs-lint))
(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook 'my-haskell-mode-hook)
and after this, you'll be able to run hs-lint command with C-c l key binding when you open your filw with Haskell source code

Small blorg.el hacking

2009-01-08T10:01:00.002+01:00

Slightly hacked the blorg.el package, that I use to generate blog on my site (it is used mostly for article announcements, etc). Following changes were made:

Proper generation of links to files, without explicit specification of the file:// scheme
Copying of files into blorg directories was removed - i don't want to copy files, that are already on my site
Proper escaping of the <, >, &, ", was implemented (although may be not in all places - please let me know, if you'll find, that text is generated improperly)

Another thing that I want to make is generation of the file names for notes with non-latin symbols in titles. After this change, package will almost ready to use. For my site I also need to align HTML template to match design of the my site, and make proper generation of links for JS-Kit Comment Widget.
Пример сгенерированных страниц вы можете найти тут, а сам модифицированный пакет можно скачать вот тут.