http://www.omnigia.com/news Scheme, web applications, tech Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:49:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Today I uploaded Ubuntu source and binary (Gutsy and Hardy) packages for Zorba, the new C++ streaming XQuery processor. The Ubuntu PPA system (Personal Package Archives) is a great service; without it, you'd need to host an APT repository in order to conveniently distribute packages that are not (yet) part ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/05/19/debian-ubuntu-packaging-zorba/ I've been doing quite a bit of C++ programming (and, alas, debugging) for a project lately. One endless source of annoyance in C++ (at least in Linux) is the impedance mismatch between the compiler (gcc) and the debugger (gdb). C++ is notoriously hard to compile (and even just parse). gdb ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/04/30/gdb-examining-complex-c-objects/ While everyone is familiar with bash's TAB completion for paths and filenames, fewer people know that since bash 2.04, TAB can complete arguments in many more contexts thanks to a feature called programmable bash completion. The default completions handle mount, cvs, ant, ssh and many others; it's also possible to ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/02/19/ssh-bash-completion-fix/ I have recently had the chance to play again with the 3 BSD's, under the excuse of testing the portability of a piece of software. I was able to install all of them in separate virtual machines under VMWare Server. I'm summarizing my impressions below. Chiefly, I was surprised at ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2008/01/30/3-bsd-vmware-install-impressions/ If you search for xpath and mozilla, you will find a lot of pages telling you how to do a single query (I personally learned from Mark Pilgrim's excellent Dive into Greasemonkey). What you will not find, though, is how to further refine the xpath results by chaining a second ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/11/30/chained-xpath-browser-query/ After setting up Bluetooth on my phone and laptop, I was faced with another problem: the phone saves images using filenames of the form ImageXXX.jpg — which is OK the first time, but tends to conflict with older files later on as the "XXX" counter restarts from 0. One may ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/10/28/mass-generating-random-file-names/ Note: updated for Hardy (2008-06-09) Note: for the impatient, just use the script at the end of this post. I recently received a Nokia 6300 as a birthday present. After playing with the cool 2-megapixel camera I wanted to save some of the pictures and clips to my laptop. The most convenient ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/10/24/bluetooth-ubuntu-manual/ Calling Javascript from Scheme just got easier in CPSCM: (define v 10) (define (f x) (+ x v)) (%cpscm:native "alert (" v ")") ;; Can pass Scheme variables and computations (%cpscm:native "alert (" (f 5) ")") All string arguments to %cpscm:native are copied verbatim to the output. Inner computations are still compiled as any normal Scheme ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/09/10/cpscm-native-calls/ Given the preliminary results, it looks like R6RS will pass with a 66% margin (I predicted 70% a while ago). Strangely, official results haven't been announced yet, in violation of the announced schedule. More strangely, everyone seems to be quiet on this delay; I suspect that the nays are hoping ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/08/27/r6rs-post-voting/ I've been considering an elisp back-end for CPSCM (so that we can program Emacs in R5RS Scheme). I thought the lack of lexical scoping would prove a major stumbling block, but in the end it turns out that Elisp will be somewhat easier to support than Common Lisp. Here are ... http://www.omnigia.com/news/2007/08/07/emacs-lisp-scoping-globals/