code.h(oe)kje

I like my macbook for the OS, but seriously. I just recorded 20 minutes of video and now there's no way to export it? What the bloody @!#@?

I just released the source code for the simple synthesizer, for those who are interested.

Flash finally raised my curiousity by adding fully programmable audio in Flash player 10. This means you can read the currently playing audio stream to provide reasonably accurate VU meters etc, but more interesting, it means you can write your own audio-generating algorithms.

To test if flash is actually fast enough and to see if it's really possible to write flash apps using nothing but the free mxmlc compiler and emacs, I wrote a simple synthesizer in flash 10. The result is fairly pleasing.

Check it out!

For a mod_perl project I'm working on I wanted a way to track the apache error log and jump to the source of the errors from emacs.

Fortunately, emacs' (compile) command makes this very easy:

;; restarts apache and track the error log
(defun apache-restart-and-tail ()
      (interactive)
      (compile "sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart && sudo tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log"))

;; key binding
(global-set-key (kbd "<C-kp-enter>") 'apache-restart-and-compile)

My current favorite Emacs*font to work with the new XFT backend is Inconsolata. I've tried a few others, but this font is just very clear, not too fat and not too skinny, and it has a slashed zero, as a programming font should.

There's a debian package too, called "ttf-inconsolata". ** See update below.

Screenshot:

Update: the current debian ttf-inconsolata has a bug somewhere that means you can't actually use the font. A simple remedy is to install the ttf-inconsolata package and then symlink /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/Inconsolata.ttf to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-inconsolata/Inconsolata.otf

This may not be technically correct, but it does work.

Also, on my current emacs CVS builds, I need to add the following to my .Xresources to get the anti-aliasing to work reliably:

Emacs.FontBackend: xft

In which I poke your eye with the details of prototypes and constructors in JavaScript. Includes pretty diagrams! Read it here:
Constructors considered mildly confusing.

The emacs-unicode-2 branch has been merged into the main branch. This means really good looking fonts for everyone on X11.

Get it now:


cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co

sudo make install


There's no gui interface to select these fonts. I just put the following entry in my .Xresources:

Emacs*font: Monospace-10


Replace "Monospace-10" with whatever font you like.

As one or two of my readers may know, Arc is a project by Paul Graham to produce a new Lisp/Scheme dialect for the future. Up till now details about it have been very sparse, but today the first version was released.

From the notes:

Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn't have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn't distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn't have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers.

Sounds like a combo of JavaScript and Common Lisp to me, though I'm slightly disappointed about the (current) use of ASCII as the only charset.

When I've played with it a bit I may post more.

Get it here!

Update: here's a tutorial

Joost.

From comp.lang.lisp:

Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz are proud to announce the European Common Lisp Meeting 2008. The meeting will consist of a Sunday full of talks on April 20, 2008, with optional dinners on Saturday and Sunday evening.

http://weitz.de/eclm2008/

Jonathan Stowe wrote a short piece on a demo he gave on making music with perl and includes code and mp3. He's been using my Audio::SndFile and Audio::LADSPA modules and was kind enough to also write some positive reviews on them.

Audio::LADSPA review, Audio::SndFile review.