yonkeltron » F/OSS

Great post about Emacs keyboard macros

Jonathan Magen — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:45:41 +0000

I always find great stuff on the emacs-fu blog but today I read a particularly-wonderful post about Emacs keyboard macros. Like the author, I’ve been a long-time Emacs user but never really got into keyboard macros because it’s been quite easy to produce an elisp one-liner in many cases. That being said, this seems like a great time to learn so I look forward to reading more on the topic of keyboard macros as well as learning some new tricks.

Thanks for a great post!

newhaven.rb hackfest tomorrow!

Jonathan Magen — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:00:54 +0000

Tomorrow, in New Haven, CT will be the “Ruby, White and Blue” Hackfest run by newhaven.rb. We’ll be working on a few projects including the group’s site and most likely some Prawn and ScosugBot stuff. Beginners and people interested in learning are more than welcome and we hope to have some excellent projects for people to get started on.

Fill out the RSVP form and we’ll meet at 6pm EST at Blue State Coffee on Thursday, July 1st. Bring a computer and let’s write some code.

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Debian package state backup and restore

Jonathan Magen — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:24:02 +0000

While getting into bundler (which is great, btw), I recalled how often I have longed for a way to do something similar in Debian. What I’d really like to be able to do is something like aptitude backup and get some sort of backup file which contained all of the packages I had asked to be installed so that I could install a new base system and then do an aptitude restore and have those packages be installed. Obviously, this would pull in the required dependencies which is what we wanted anyway. I’ve seen only a few attempts at this and most are pretty hairy. Is there a good way to do this currently? Are there plans for this in the future? Is this an irrational desire?

Building shared libraries

Jonathan Magen — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:12:41 +0000

Being a Debian user, I don’t make a habit of compiling things by hand and on those occasions when I do need to do so, I usually use apt-build (good article, though a bit old here). However, today I had to get a particularly odd shared library with a very specific version to match a production environment we have at work. So, I downloaded the tarball, which was quite large, and then compiled it. Which took four and a half minutes on my dual-core (1.83GHz) ThinkPad running make -j 4 which isn’t all that slow, really.

Once it was completed, I looked around (grepped around) for the output file and was dismayed to discover that there weren’t any. After tinkering around for about an hour, I finally figured out that you can request shared libraries be built by providing an option to the configure script:

./configure --enable-shared

Shortly thereafter, I got the shared library version I needed and was on the road again. Just a useful tip which I hope can be of help to someone.

Rails + Merb = Rails 3

Jonathan Magen — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:33:42 +0000

I’m rather excited about this. Saw this talk right here.

Oh, and then there’s this.

Neato article about NoSQL on Ars Technica

Jonathan Magen — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:46:28 +0000

I am very excited by some of the NoSQL stuff out there and enjoyed a recent Ars Technica article. The first page is some neat background and the second page has a good overview of some NoSQL options out there.

http://arstechnica.com/business/data-centers/2010/02/-since-the-rise-of.ars/

Cool Free/Open Source Software from Google

Jonathan Magen — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:59:10 +0000

As has been spoken about endlessly (OStatic, OSnews), there is a great blog post from 0x1fff with many (started at 35, is now many more) open source projects from Google. In fact and indeed, there is some cool stuff on there. I knew about Caja and Protocol Buffers (wish there was a JS port of protocol buffers) but did not know about CRUSH and skia. Honestly, there are plenty of cool projects out there and my already-positive opinion of Google is only bolstered by the fact that they give back so willingly. Gotta love it.

ES5 is finally here, JavaScript geeks rejoice!

Jonathan Magen — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:03:56 +0000

So, earlier this week, it was announced that ECMAScript 5 has finally been released. This is a good thing and I caught the highlights on InfoQ. The full draft is a 252 page PDF beast of a document which covers basically about everything there is to cover. The things which strike me as interesting are the improved Array functions (like map, filter and reduce), some (finally) ways to harden Objects (in the form of freeze and seal) and JSON in the language. The other big deal which has me excited is the availability of a strict mode which has been spoken about by Douglas Crockford in his Google Tech Talk as well in his book JavaScript: The Good Parts, which you should buy. Honestly, it makes you appreciate JavaScript so very, very much as D-Crock highlights the best and worst features of JavaScript.

In reality, this has been a big month for JavaScript with Google open sourcing its internal JS toolkit, Closure along with much attention being paid to to projects like NodeJS (for network stuff) and CommonJS (for everything else).

Messing with OpenStreetMap

Jonathan Magen — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:31:34 +0000

Some people might not see the reason for a project like OpenStreetMap when there are plenty of good mapping products and services laying around. I am not one of them. Whenever I use a GPS, I think quite a bit about it’s inner workings. How does it figure out which route is best? How does it calculate things on the fly? All of these questions usually lead me to think, at one point or another, that it depends very much on the data. While most mapping services and individual GPS devices use various algorithms for calculating routes, etc. (prob based on some weighted graph or something), they also rely on different sets of map data. A GPS can only tell you where on the planet you are, not what road you are on. For that, it needs map data. The only issue is that all of the map data used by popular services is proprietary!

Enter, OpenStreetMap. Seeded with the geographical data made publicly available by various governments and public universities, OpenStreetMap provides Free (as in freedom, licensed under CC-BY-SA) map data to anyone who wants it. The data is usually in pretty good shape because the initial measurements are in good shape. However, things aren’t perfect. Lucky for the web, OpenStreetMap.org allows users to help improve the data in a number of ways.

First, users can upload GPS traces to help improve the quality of unmapped regions such as seriously-rural areas along with bike and hiking trails. Second, users are able to tweak the mapping data to correct errors. There are a number of ways to do this but OpenStreetMap.org has an online editor which lets you overlay OSM data onto sattelite imagery so you can move those roads, landmarks and the like into the right location. In about an hour, I had cleaned up much of my hometown and began to add local landmarks, parks and buildings. It’s quite easy.

The project itself seems off to a great start and the planet shows a fair bit of activity. In particular, I like the idea of mapping parties where people get together and work on a given area. This seems like a great way to give back to the community and I plan to float the idea at the next SCOSUG meeting.

Data visualization on a web page

Jonathan Magen — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:06:07 +0000

Quickie: Two of my favorite ways to get data visualized on a web page are the Google Chart API and flot, the amazing canvas-based plotting library built on top of jQuery.

The Google Chart API provides a rediculously clever way to get high-quality information graphics which are generated on the back of the clearly-amazing Google infrastructure. You just use the URL layout provided and it sort of just works. All types of charts can be created. It’s very nice if you’re willing to take the time to piece together the URLs in the proper format. There are some abstractions, though.

Then there’s flot (which I’m told is Swedish for “pretty”). Flot is a library written in JavaScript on top of jQuery which produces very nice charts inside a canvas element. The demos are quite gorgeous and it’s operation seems straightforward enough. As a side note, Lift has a built-in flot widget.