The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

Well, I've just spent the last half an hour reading the release notes for PHP 7.1 alpha, and in particular the changes regarding the use of array short-form syntax, that's '[]' to you and me. My lasting impression what that: other scripting languages already do this so PHP is only playing catch-up. Lisp Once again, a language proudly announces a "new" feature that actually already exists half a century ago in Lisp. One day we will all realise that Lisp is actually more productive than "ECMA script based language foo" and start using it. Lisp For all of its wondrous capabilities, Lisp still suffers from a seemingly snobby community that eschews anything remotely close to a "noob" question at times and it can be hard to get to grips with because as yet, apart from Slime and Emacs, there is still a lack of decent IDE support. There's been a lot of discussion recently on the Lispworks forums about tarting up the appearance of ...

Ok, my iMac is late 2012 and only has 8GB of RAM. I decided to see if it would be possible to speed up my development cycle, especially for running unit tests and the like but just as much for an improved build time as well. After much fiddling in the dark and reading some great pages, I eventually came up with the following solution that works for me but bear this in mind: Danger Will Robinson RAM is volatile so everything you do is gone forever when you unmount it or shutdown so don't forget to copy your changes elsewhere. If you have Git integrated properly then get into the habit of committing frequently. I have considered writing a small bash script to run `rsync` from a custom menu option  (and thus a shortcut key binding) or look into using the Apple Automator to transfer any changed files across to the hard drive. Whatever... you have been warned! Step one: Create the RAM disk, I do it like this: diskutil erasevolume HFS + "RAMBO" `hdiutil attac...

Having recently configured AndroidStudio to use a RAM disk for Gradle, I thought I would look around and see if I can use the remaining space for Opera. This is essentially a reproduction of this fine page: http://www.ghacks.net/2010/10/20/how-to-change-the-opera-cache-directory/ That page does not deal with Macs though and after a little bit of experimentation I came up with this spell: open /Applications/Opera.app/ --args --disk-cache-dir=/Volumes/RamDisk/opera For the record, here is my Opera version: Make sure that the specified folder exists before starting Opera, if might automatically create the folder for you but I didn't bother to find out, I hate disappointment. And for the record, the way I create a RAM disk on my iMac, which is done automatically when I log in, is like this: diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "RamDisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://4194304` The above line was courtesy of this YouTube video: Thanks to Bartech TV then! So, with Turbo m...

I am in the process of reviving an old project from 2014 that I never finished because of other work commitments. In that time, bitrot has set in, the Android API has moved on and all in all, the home-brewed HTTP server I wrote using SocketServer and the org.apache libraries had to go! I looked around, found a couple of contenders and after much time decided to go with NanoHTTPD because it is lean, small and fits in exactly two files. The main server is in one file `NanoHTTPD.java`and there is another file called `ServerRunner.java` which manages instances of running servers. The others The other project I looked at is this one:  https://github.com/koush/AndroidAsync which led me a merry dance and I just couldn't figure out how get the POST data I had uploaded. I spent a few days really digging at it with Wire Shark too to make sure the data was going up. It was. Whatever... I had used it via a gradle dependency entry but I dropped it and went back to NanoHTTPD. For m...