Will Farrington

Finding the Language of the Current Buffer in Emacs

2009-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

Finding the Language of the Current Buffer in Emacs

23 April 2009 - Georgia Tech

I'm currently writing some code that looks at the current buffer and uses it to determine the language the buffer's written in if there is one.

(defun add-import-find-language ()
  (cond
   ;; check major mode
   ((not (string= major-mode "fundamental-mode"))
    (let ((current-mode (symbol-name major-mode)))
      (string-match "^\\([[:alpha:]-]+\\)\\-mode" current-mode)
      (match-string 1 current-mode)))
   ;; check extension
   ((or (buffer-file-name) (buffer-name))
    (let ((bufname (or (buffer-file-name) (buffer-name))))
      (dolist (pair auto-mode-alist)
        (if (string-match (car pair) bufname)
            (let ((current-mode (symbol-name (cdr pair))))
              (string-match "^\\([[:alpha:]-]+\\)\\-mode" current-mode)
              (return (match-string 1 current-mode)))))))
   ;; check buffer-local var language
   (language
    (let ((current-mode (symbol-name language)))
      (string-match "^\\([[:alpha:]-]+\\)" current-mode)
      (return (match-string 0 current-mode)))))
  )

Note: Code highlighting currently disabled due to a bug in Jekyll.

The comments should make most everything pretty clear, but the add-import-find-language function, which will be part of another side project I've been tinkering with, steps through the major-mode, the "file extension" (the caveat there being it checks both buffer-file-name and buffer-name just in case the buffer was created without find-file or similar), and finally checks for a buffer-local variable language to determine the buffer's language, which it returns as a string.

There are no doubt edge-cases where this function fails to do the right thing. If you happen to find one, please file an issue and, if possible, also a link to your own fork of add-import.el with the fix(es).

End of Semester (And Semi-Related Random Thoughts)

2009-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

End of Semester (And Semi-Related Random Thoughts)

19 April 2009 - Georgia Tech

The end of the semester is growing near. It's one of those things that is an inevitability, but nevertheless, nobody really enjoys it, mostly because this is the busiest part of the whole semester.

I'm looking forward, though. I'll be taking Combinatorics, Abnormal Psychology, and various CS courses over the next two semesters.

I put through some layout changes to the front page. It looks a lot nicer now, I think. I also bummed some neat JavaScript from Bruce Williams, which'll make a difference when I actually have a sizable amount of content up. If, rather.

Caught a talk from Bjarne Stroustrup yesterday. It was enjoyable, but it made me glad I don't use C++. It's improving, but I feel infinitely more productive in Lisp or Ruby. Or even Python. It's just how I roll.

I'm finally enjoying all the benefits of a dual monitor setup. I might be using an old CRT as my second monitor, but it's still so much more convenient. I'd really like to see OS X add the capability to have each display show a different space, but as it is, I feel like my productivity has increased loads just having so much more screen real estate.

I bought a pair of Shure SE115-K's. They're enjoyable IEM earphones. I'd like a huge pair of Sennheiser cans, but budget is ever the concern, so I'll take what I can get. The bass is wonderful in these though, not nearly as overwhelming as I was afraid it might be. Anyone looking for a pair of earphones in the $100 range should consider them, though you might be able to find some SE210's on sale for that much somewhere, which are a step up.

I'm loving iReddit. I got a free copy (thanks again!) from Alex Ohanian, and honestly, I would've paid for it if I didn't already own a copy. It's a wonderful way to pass time when I'm stuck in the Student Center or something on a weekday. It's just completely wonderful.

I still believe that Firefox 3.5b and Safari 4b need to make a lovechild which has all the integration and speed of Safari, with the capabilities of the Awesomebar and some sort of add-ons system. As it is now, I can never quite get happy with either browser, but Safari 4b is still barely winning.

I'm glad GitHub's buildbot for Pages is working for me again.

Backing VoodooPad Up On GitHub

2009-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

Backing VoodooPad Up On GitHub

8 April 2009 -- Georgia Tech

Here's a bit of code to backup VoodooPad on GitHub by CrankyMonkey:

I use VoodooPad for all sorts of note-taking, but especially for classes. I highly recommend it.

Yahoo! Hack Week - Georgia Tech

2009-03-09T00:00:00-07:00

Yahoo! Hack Week - Georgia Tech

9 March 2009 - Georgia Tech

This past week I've been happy to participate in the Yahoo! HackU Hack Week and I've had a blast doing so, even though I missed out on a lot of the presentations and luncheons due to schedule conflicts. Such is college life.

The one talk I did make it to was the one given on Tuesday by Chris Heilmann. It was incredibly humorous (not unlike its author), and also very informative. It was also full of shameless self-promotion, which is comforting (these code ninjas are people too, allegedly). All in all, its main purpose was to prepare us for what Hack Day was going to be. Most of us took it in stride, and as a result, underestimated how frustrating a 24-hackathon can actually be, but we quickly learned the hard way (like spending a whole hour debugging 7 lines of code).

The rest of Chris's talk centered around the web and the way developers can approach it to deliver content to users in the way that's most useful to them. Most of it was stuff I already "knew", but gained a better understanding of, so it was a good use of time. Free food and swag also made it enjoyable.

I still think it was the best talk of the whole week.

Skip ahead to Friday at 5pm (Josh and I started late because I had a class). Josh and I were unsure of our original idea, and on the 5-minute walk from D.M. Smith to the CoC, I came up with the idea that we actually worked on for Hack Day. That'd be YQL.el. In short, it's an Emacs interface to Yahoo's Yahoo! Query Language, a method for essentially using SQL-like statements to access and mix the data you might otherwise do with Yahoo! Pipes.

My main inspirations for the idea were:

A lot of Emacs users I know either live in Emacs, or try their best to do so
A sizable portion of those are blind programmers

Obviously, given that I'm not blind I can't really say definitively whether or not YQL's console is suitable for that use-case, but I'm inclined to say regardless of that, S-expressions are much nicer to deal with in general -- especially programmatically -- and thus, they would likely be preferable to both seeing and blind programmers. Whether or not we pulled it off as well as it could be is in the eye of the beholder.

We finished the project sufficiently enough for our presentation. It had some issues that might have been solved if we'd been well-rested, but for the most part, it was acceptable for a presentation in our minds. The presentation itself went okay. I was incredibly nervous, and it was apparent from the rate at which I was speaking. One of our demo functions (integrated Yahoo! search) failed due to of all things having two functions called in the wrong order (tried to define a key in a mode-map that wasn't defined yet).

After all the other groups presented their projects, we were lucky to get to listen to a talk from Douglas Crockford, as in the author of JavaScript: The Good Parts and JavaScript legend (who I knew from reading the copy of Beautiful Code I got from GSoC last summer). It was a little on the slow side, as often good talks are wont to be, but it was by far the most in-depth analysis of the vices and virtues of JavaScript I've ever listened to without feeling bored. He also loves lambda, which made me near shout for joy when he threw this line into his talk:

lambdas are the single best thing invented in the history of programming languages

That's paraphrased a bit, but I'm glad he loves the lambda as much as I do.

Then came the awards! YQL.el got the "Hack for Good" award, which I'm absolutely thrilled about. With it came a few free t-shirts, a little wizard trophy, and something that's apparently getting mailed to me (I couldn't hear what was said over the applause). If you'd like to get a glimpse at the incredibly rough version of the code that we demoed, you'll want to look at the tag for 0.1. Like I said, it's really rough code at this point, so don't look to that for production quality.

I have been putting some significant work into the code today, and hopefully I'll have a 0.2 release with the next week or two which should be, by most standards, "production ready". At that point, I'll be looking to both assign copyright to the FSF (I doubt they will be interested in including a package which relies on proprietary technology running on proprietary servers, but it's still a good thing to do) and get the package included in ELPA. In the mean time, if you're interested, go ahead and fork the project and send me a Pull Request for your changes.

On ZSH

2009-01-29T00:00:00-08:00

On ZSH

29 Jan 2009 - Georgia Tech

Ever since I really got into programming, and making my computer work the way I want rather than the way someone else does, I've heard a lot about zsh. It gets near endless praise among most everyone I know who uses it. Really, I'm told there's a lot to like.

However, transitioning from bash to zsh might not be all that easy, especially given that I already have a fairly nice bash config (mostly thanks to Nathan Weizenbaum. Right now, I'm taking the easy way out, and using someone else's config. That's only a stop-gap solution though. Really, I'd like to get to the point where I can come up with my own suitably acceptable config that "just works".

What I really need out of a shell is simple enough, but it'll be a bit of an interesting adventure to migrate it all from bash to zsh:

Colors (both in directory listings/completions and in commands like git)
Auto-completion for as many tools under the sun as possible (even better if it's fuzzy)
A super sexy prompt. Namely a perfect clone of the one I currently have (user@host ~/full/path/with/tilde/snafu[gitbranch])

I'm sure there are a few other things that I enjoy using in a shell, but those are really the main criteria. Hopefully, in getting those (and more) set up in my zsh config, others will be able to find something new and make use of it.

You can follow my progress by following my dotfiles repository, or by just taking a gander at the zsh-specific stuff I'm working on.

Edit: I've pretty much finished all my work on it up. The two relevant bits are the git prompt snafu and the main rc file.

My Firefox Setup

2009-01-15T00:00:00-08:00

My Firefox Setup

15 Jan 2009 - Georgia Tech

Following a long series of disappointments from the Safari camp, namely the issue of cookies disappearing like a Cookie Monster convention was in town, I've switched (back) to using Firefox on Mac OS X.

It was far from pleasant at first, but finally I think I've got it configured just the way I want it, and I might be happy with this workflow:

Extensions
/Find Bar/ -- Gives the findbar regexp magic.
Adblock Plus
Firebug 1.3.0b7
Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X -- Allows me to view PDFs in-browser via PDFKit.
Greasemonkey
Inquisitor -- An awesome searching add-on that I loved in Safari.
oldbar -- Makes the location bar suck less.
Socialite 1.2.4pre4 -- Reddit integration. Currently in-development. Working with the dev to fix a couple bugs/quirks.
Ubiquity 0.1.5 -- Quicksilver in the browser, essentially.
Theme
GrApple Yummy 1.9.9.18 -- Make Firefox look more like Safari. Needs skinnier tabs though.

It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn close.

On HOPE (and why it doesn't really offer any)

2008-12-24T00:00:00-08:00

On HOPE (and why it doesn't really offer any)

24 Dec 2008 - Conyers

The Georgia public university system has a specialized state scholarship program (known as HOPE) that is generally recognized as being just the best-thing-since-peanut-butter. I happen to disagree with the notion. You know what that means -- time to vent on my blog.

The requirements for HOPE are pretty simple, and don't even seem all that hard at face value: maintain a 3.0 GPA in high school, and for the duration of your college career, and the state of Georgia will pay for a significant portion of your college (read: tuition + book money) education. Sounds like a good deal. Even looks like one. In this case, it's not actually a duck though. Just attempting to beguile us by pretending it is.

The first problem with the HOPE scholarship is that it demands that students, by defintion, perform significantly better than what is defined as the academic average, a 2.0 GPA. Were this a private scholarship rather than a public one, this would be perfectly acceptable; however, given that it is in fact a public scholarship, this begs the question why performing at an average level, or indeed anywhere between an average and whatever-a-3.0-means-you-are level, is not good enough for a scholarship with the goal of helping Georgia students get ahead. If you're going to be a public service, then why design the system with a sort of exclusivity in the first place? There's obviously a concern about whether taxpayer money is being spent appropriately. Okay, that's fine. It's a legitimate argument. But that still doesn't account for why performing at an average level isn't considered acceptable. Either HOPE's demands are off, or the grading scale is. I think it's the former.

The other inherent problem with HOPE is that it operates under the assumption that college and high school are pretty much the same. Only an idiot would really feel that way. High school is far, far easier on so many levels. If someone actually said to me "Well, you know, college is just as easy as high school," I'd either be asking them which community college they're attending or laughing my ass off.

But wait, it's that first case I was getting at.

The problem created by the two previously mentioned problems (problems built on other problems for jeebus' sake!) is a simple one: if you want to maintain that lovely bit of financial assistance that the state of Georgia so graciously gives to you, you're better off picking an easier school. I see it all the time. There are plenty of kids going to Georgia State University, or GCSU, or Georgia Southern who could well be going to UGA or Georgia Tech (the latter being my own school) but refuse to do so because they're afraid they might actually perform closer to the average level and lose their financial aid. Sure, maybe a few of them could manage a 3.0 at say, Tech, if they skimp out entirely on the "college experience", but statistically speaking, the strong majority of them won't.

Rather than compelling a new generation to push boundaries, HOPE's holding them back. It's for this reason that we Techies recite one of our many mottos: "Welcome to Georgia Tech, where your best isn't good enough since 1885." Doesn't leave much room for hope for HOPE, does it?

Testing the Waters

2008-12-21T00:00:00-08:00

Testing the Waters

21 Dec 2008 - Conyers

I'm playing around with Tom Preston-Werner's Jekyll, which allows me to, in short, host a static blog on GitHub Pages, and control it all with the power of git.

It's also my grandmother's 75th birthday, so I'm going to go celebrate with the family.