Category “Software Programming” — 23 articles

Peter Norvig published a while ago a very nice article titled Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle wherein he presents a programmatic approach to solving that puzzle game. The article is very well written and makes it easy to think that coming up with the code for such a solver is a very easy task, you apply some basic problem search principles and there you are. Which is partly true, in fact. Also, he uses python, and that means that a lot of trivial programming activities are not a concern anymore, such as memory management.

A breadcrumb is a navigation aid. I just added one to this website, so that it gets easier to browse from any article to its local and parents indexes and back to /dev/dim, the root webpage of this site. As it was not that much work to implement, here’s the whole of it: ;;; ;;; Breadcrumb support ;;; (defun tapoueh-breadcrumb-to-current-page () "Return a list of (name . link) from the index root page to current one" (let* ((current (muse-current-file)) (cwd (file-name-directory current)) (project (muse-project-of-file current)) (root (muse-style-element :path (caddr project))) (path (tapoueh-path-to-root)) (dirs (split-string (file-relative-name current root) "/"))) ;; ("blog" "2011" "07" "13-back-from-char11.

Most of you are probably reading my posts directly in their RSS reader tools (mine is gnus thanks to the Gwene service), so you probably missed it, but I just pushed a whole new version of my website, still using Emacs Muse as the engine. My setup is tentatively called tapoueh.el and browsable online. It consists of some tweaks on top of Muse, so that I can enjoy tags and proper rss support.

If you’ve not been following along, you might have missed it: it appears to me that even today, in 2011, mail systems work much better when setup the old way. Meaning with a local MTA for outgoing mail. With some niceties, such as sender dependent relayhost maps. That’s why I needed M-x mailq to display the mail queue and have some easy shortcuts in order to operate it (mainly f runs the command mailq-mode-flush, but per site and per id delivery are useful too).

The previous article about M-x mailq has raised several mails asking me details about the Postfix setup I’m talking about. The problem we’re trying to solve is having a local MTA to send mails, so that any old-style Unix tool just works, instead of only the MUA you’ve spent time setting up. Postfix makes it possible to do that quite easily, but it gets a little more involved if you have more than one relayhost that you want to use depending on your current From address.