“Software” Tagged Pages

NotDeft

Revised on Sunday, May 9, 2021
Created on Tuesday, August 22, 2017

NotDeft is an Emacs-based manager and local search engine for directories of plain text notes. NotDeft features a Xapian backend for efficient free-text search over potentially very large numbers of note files; in that respect it is like the Notmuch Emacs mode for managing email. NotDeft is a spin-off of the Deft note manager, and retains similar functionality for browsing, filtering, and managing note collections. While NotDeft inherits its user interface from Deft, that interface is used for managing search result sets of notes, rather than directory contents.

Org-Mode iCalendar Import with Conversion to Floating Times

Revised on Friday, January 25, 2019
Created on Sunday, January 20, 2019

In an earlier blog post I wrote about using Emacs Org mode for calendaring, and exporting iCalendar files with TIMEZONE information (including “VTIMEZONE” definitions, as specified by RFC 5545). Another side of the picture is importing from iCalendar into Org, and in this post I introduce a little Ruby script I recently finished writing for that purpose. I don't think I'm the first person to have written a half-baked script for iCalendar-to-Org import, but the special requirement I had was that I wanted to be able to interpret “DATE WITH UTC TIME” values in a non-standard way, and convert them into “floating” times (without time zone information).

Org-Mode iCalendar Export with Explicit Time Zones

Revised on Thursday, August 23, 2018
Created on Tuesday, July 3, 2018

For several years I used Symbian phones for calendaring, and the biggest issue for me was the lack of support for time zones: there was neither a way to specify a “floating” time, nor could you select a specific time zone for an appointment. Times would be interpreted in the context of the currently selected system-wide local time zone, and shifted later when changing the time zone setting. Consequently, I avoided ever changing time zones to retain the times as entered.

Fetching Web Pages into NotDeft

Written on Thursday, March 22, 2018

I'm increasingly using NotDeft not only for note taking, but also for capturing information from various sources. To some extent it already acts as a lightweight substitute for the likes of Evernote. As explained in the documentation, Org mode's built-in capture protocol can be used to send snippets of text from a page open in a web browser into one's NotDeft note collection. Sometimes, however, we already have a URL of an interesting page in our clipboard, and we would like to fetch the entire page's textual content into NotDeft with a single command.

Transient Directories in NotDeft

Revised on Friday, February 16, 2018
Created on Sunday, January 21, 2018

My NotDeft note manager has an optional notdeft-path feature to better support transient directories of notes. Also in the standard configuration, the notdeft-directories list may contain directories that do not have to always exist, as any non-existing directories are simply ignored; if and when they appear, they can be included in subsequent searches. Note, however, that the notdeft-directories variable is normally set only once, and if the initializer expression includes wildcards, the variable value may not contain directories that get mounted or copied over later.

Mixing Hand-Written, Generating, and Generated Code with Koog

Revised on Thursday, January 18, 2018
Created on Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Some days ago I released a little code generation utility that I have been using for well over a year in cranking out repetitive C++ code. Koog is—for lack of a better established term—a mixed-code generator. It is similar to other tools of its kind (such as Cog), but the only one that I know of that uses the Scheme language for specifying what code to generate. The concept of mixed-code generation is simple.

Koog

Revised on Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Created on Monday, September 27, 2010

Koog is a mixed-code generation tool. It supports a choice of comment styles (C-style block comments by default), and assumes that code-generation directives are written in Racket. Koog provides a Racket API, a command-line interface, and editor integration for Emacs and Vim. The one novel feature it has (compared to existing mixed-code generators) is the option of only (re)generating individual code regions, which provides more control when used interactively in an editor.

ContextLogger2 Technical Report Published

Revised on Friday, November 3, 2017
Created on Saturday, August 28, 2010

I wrote a technical report about the ContextLogger2 software that I’ve been working on at HIIT of late. The direct URL and other publication details can be found from this page. The entire series of electronically published HIIT technical reports is available from here.

On Racket Support in Emacs Org-Mode

Revised on Sunday, October 25, 2015
Created on Thursday, September 8, 2011

Earlier I blogged about Epresent, which is basically a piece of code for making Org-Mode suitable for preparing presentation slides. There are times when I can’t resist mentioning the innovative Racket programming language in a presentation. In those situations I tend to want to have syntax-highlighted Scheme code on my slides, and also to evaluate the code snippets and insert the results next to the code listing. This is apparently the sort of thing one can do with Org-Mode Babel, for a variety of languages.

Dictionary-Enabled Racket Support for Emacs

Written on Friday, August 23, 2013

For the last month or so I've found Racket programming even more enjoyable than before. The reason for this is a tool named Ractionary (short for Racket Dictionary Generator), which I wrote for extracting information about Racket language names. Said information can easily be used for setting up some Racket language awareness for Emacs. There is an Emacs tradition of running an external Lisp (or "inferior Lisp") process to allow for dynamic evaluation of foreign (non Emacs Lisp) code, and this kind of a solution could be used to query information known to Racket on demand.

Another PIM Data Exporter

Written on Thursday, August 22, 2013

My little SMS Exporter utility app has probably been downloaded quite a few times by virtue of it having been available for many years. Now it's time to introduce another PIM data exporter application: Anyxporter. This new application is capable of exporting contact data, and supports both MeeGo Harmattan and (some versions of) Symbian. One of the shortcomings of SMS Exporter is that its export data format is not as machine readable as it could be.

SMS Exporter

Last modified on Wednesday, August 14, 2013

This is a small utility that allows one to export and/or delete all the short messages in the Inbox and Sent folders of one's S60 phone. In principle all S60 based phones should be supported, but testing on all S60 platform releases (let alone individual phone models) has not been done. Known compatible platform releases are: S60 2nd Edition FP2, S60 3rd Edition FP1, Symbian Anna, and Nokia Belle. The tool was hacked together in a rather hurried manner, so use at your own risk, and please let me know if you come across any problems with it—I haven't.

SMS Exporter v1.10 Released

Written on Tuesday, May 21, 2013

I was recently motivated to install some Symbian SDKs again, after quite a long break from Symbian programming. So here, an updated release of SMS Exporter for Symbian. SMS Exporter v1.10 should fix some of the potential-incompatibility installation warnings that the previous release may have caused on newer phones. The good news is that since there probably aren't going to be any still newer Symbian phones (now that the Nokia 808 PureView has indeed been confirmed to be "

Rascal Mode for Emacs Released

Written on Monday, October 8, 2012

During the last year or so I've written some program transformations in the Rascal programming language. I find it beneficial to have an Emacs mode for any language I make significant use of. Not finding an existing one for Rascal, I proceeded to put one together myself. See Emacs Mode for Rascal (on GitHub) for the code. The mode has its imperfections. Rascal is not exactly a small language, and while it has a C-like surface syntax, there is some unusual syntax that seems tricky to get right.

Presenting with Emacs

Revised on Friday, February 10, 2012
Created on Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Text rendering in Emacs has been looking mighty good since 23.1, and this opens up possibilities to do even more in Emacs. For example, I recently came across something called epresent.el on GitHub, by Eric Schulte et al. The epresent.el Emacs Lisp file leverages Org-Mode to implement a simple presentation mode for Emacs. Using Org-Mode is, at least for me, faster than struggling with something like OpenOffice.org Impress. Having discovered epresent.

Nokia's Products Are Error (Message) Free

Revised on Saturday, November 28, 2009
Created on Sunday, November 8, 2009

So I upgrade the firmware of my Nokia E71 from v200 something to v300 something. After the upgrade, I proceed to restore my data, as one would. No errors reported, and indeed everything was restored, with the minor exception of all of my 1540 Calendar entries, which were nowhere to be seen. The same thing with restore from memory card and restore with Nokia PC Suite. Sometimes I wish something this important would just work.

Look, S60 Software Installation with No Hands

Written on Saturday, January 17, 2009

S60 3rd Edition has been out for quite a while by now, and for me, the one thing that has all but killed the pleasure of developing native software for the platform has been the humiliating wait—dismiss dialog—wait—dismiss dialog—wait—dismiss dialog—wait procedure during installation of the software being tested and developed. For one-off installations the installation procedure is no problem, but when you’re a developer it gets old real fast. On 1st and 2nd edition I would bypass the installer by simply transferring the binaries to where they ultimately belong on the target filesystem, using a tool such as obexftp.

Another PyS60 Extension with a take_photo Function

Written on Friday, January 9, 2009

Earlier releases of the Miso PyS60 extension had a take_photo function, for taking photos (without a viewfinder). This functionality (and more) has since then been integrated to PyS60 itself in the form of the built-in camera module. I’d now like to introduce the pynewfile library for PyS60, which (at least for some S60 phones) offers an alternative to the camera module when wishing to take photos interactively with a viewfinder.

Accessing OBEX Pushed Messages with Python for S60

Written on Friday, January 2, 2009

Early last year at HIIT I hacked the Python for S60 inbox module to have it support querying for the content and metadata of messages in the device Inbox that have been sent via Bluetooth OBEX Push. (The built-in inbox module apparently only supports accessing SMS messages.) I changed the name of the hacked module to pyinbox, to avoid conflicts with the built-in Inbox access module. I recently made pyinbox available via a dedicated webpage, in case it should prove useful to others.

pyaosocket aka aosocketnativenew Released Standalone

Written on Saturday, November 29, 2008

In the PDIS project at HIIT we developed a socket library for Python for S60. The library consisted of both a native extension and quite a bit of Python code. The native extension was called aosocketnativenew, and became somewhat well known as an extension supporting non-interactive Bluetooth discovery. We never made a standalone release of the library, nor did we release a version of the native extension built for S60 3rd Edition.

SMS Exporter v1.09 Released

Written on Friday, August 8, 2008

The certificate used to sign v1.08 had expired, so created a longer lived one with openssl, and signed with that. Added the backup registration file while at it, as it had been missing from previous 3rd edition releases.