The Art of PostgreSQL

Date puzzle for starters

Friday 08 Oct 2010 3 mins read PostgreSQL

The PostgreSQL IRC channel is a good place to be, for all the very good help you can get there, because people are always wanting to remain helpful, because of the off-topics discussions sometime, or to get to talk with community core members. And to start up your day too. This morning’s question started simple : “how can I check if today is the “first sunday fo the month”. or “the second tuesday of the month” etc?

I wrote a book!

el-get reaches 1.0

Thursday 07 Oct 2010 8 mins read Projects, switch-window

Emacs Muse el-get Extensions release switch-window cssh mailq rcirc

It’s been a week since the last commits in the el-get repository, and those were all about fixing and adding recipes, and about notifications. Nothing like core plumbing you see. Also, 0.9 was released on 2010-08-24 and felt pretty complete already, then received lots of improvements. It’s high time to cross the line and call it 1.0! Now existing users will certainly just be moderatly happy to see the tool reach that version number, depending whether they think more about the bugs they want to see fixed (ftp is supported, only called http) and the new features they want to see in ( info documentation) or more about what el-get does for them already today…

Regexp performances and Finite Automata

Sunday 26 Sep 2010 3 mins read Emacs, Emacs Tips

Emacs

The major reason why I dislike perl so much, and ruby too, and the thing I’d want different in the Emacs Lisp API so far is how they set developers mind into using regexp. You know the quote, don’t you? Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. That said, some situations require the use of regexp — or are so much simpler to solve using them than the maintenance hell you’re building here ain’t that big a drag.

Postfix sender_dependent_relayhost_maps

Thursday 23 Sep 2010 2 mins read Software Programming, Emacs Lisp

mailq postfix

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.

Scratch that itch: M-x mailq

Thursday 23 Sep 2010 3 mins read Software Programming, Emacs Lisp

el-get cssh mailq postfix

Nowadays, most people would think that email is something simple, you just setup your preferred client (that’s called a MUA) with some information such as the smtp host you want it to talk to (that’s call a MTA and this one is your relayhost). Then there’s all the receiving mails part, and that’s smtp again on the server side. Then there’s how to get those mail, read them, flag them, manage them, and that’s better served by IMAP.

switch-window reaches 0.8

Monday 13 Sep 2010 1 mins read Projects, switch-window

Emacs el-get release switch-window cssh

I wanted to play with the idea of using the whole keyboard for my switch-window utility, but wondered how to get those keys in the right order and all. Finally found quail-keyboard-layout which seems to exists for such uses, as you can see: (loop with layout = (split-string quail-keyboard-layout "") for row from 1 to 4 collect (loop for col from 1 to 12 ("q" "w" "e" "r" "t" "y" "u" "i" "o" "p" "[" "]") ("a" "s" "d" "f" "g" "h" "j" "k" "l" ";" "'" "\\") ("z" "x" "c" "v" "b" "n" "m" "," ".