I’ve started work on a new mode for Emacs, which intends to be something like an “IDE” for regular expressions. There are similar tools out there, such as Reggy for OS X and The Regex Coach for Windows. But the former doesn’t show me subgroup matches, and the latter costs money and won’t run on OS X. Which made me wonder, wouldn’t this be easy to do in Emacs? Three hours later says yes.

For the next few months, I will have a “script of the week” each week: just some tiny little scripts I’ve developed over the years that I happen to find particularly useful.

Today’s is a shell script called sizes. It’s a fairly simplistic interface to the du commands which just shows you all files and directories in the current directory that are larger than one megabyte.

One of my favorite languages this year is Groovy, a scripting lanugage for the Java VM. It has a nice, clean syntax, in combination with some very powerful ideas, like it’s brand of closures. It can be close enough to Java as to be nearly indistinguishable — which is good, if you’re selling it to Java programmers; and close enough to Python that it seems like a first cousin….

Have you ever wondered how data reaches your computer from all over the world as you browse the Internet? You may have heard of TCP/IP, but what exactly is it doing to reach that single Web server over in France, all the way from the United States? How does the information reach you?

Today’s article examines how a single connection works, from my computer on the island of Grenada to another computer sitting in southern France — in this case, the website of my favorite soap company, Marius Fabre.

A few days ago I posted instructions for getting a freeware based Common Lisp installation running on your Mac. I have since discovered a better alternative: just install LispWorks Personal Edition, a free environment with a superb set of debugging and profiling tools. Note that it does have the restriction that it will only [...]

ANSI Common Lisp reference (from Franz) A web mirror of CLiki.net Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition (in HTML) The Common Lisp Cookbook EncyCMUCLopedia (excluding external resources) The Lisp HyperSpec 7.0 LispWorks 5.0 Manuals (for Mac) ECL Manual 0.9i CMUCL Manual 19d SBCL Manual 1.0.10.55 [...]

Lately I have been having a ball doing Common Lisp programming on my MacBook Pro. But as with all great starts, this was not without its pitfalls. After many frustrating hours, and questions asked on the #lisp IRC channel, I’ve come to realize that perhaps others may benefit from treading a path already trodden.

The following article resulted from several hours of battling with SELinux and Apache, attempting to find some way of serving up my Mercurial repository (now at http://hg.newartisans.com) over HTTP. Now I’m happy to bring you the fruits of that research, even though I’m still getting errors from Mercurial when trying to push (I’m using ssh at the moment). More to come on that front later…

I like having two partitions in Mac OS X: one for the operating system and Applications, another for my user data. Since my user data is changing constantly — and my system far less so — this avoids lots of needless fragmentation and clutter during long periods of extended use.

However, using BootCamp with this setup proved a challenge. The utility that comes from Apple for installing BootCamp will only let you have two partitions total: one for BootCamp, and one for OS X. But after a little bit of playing around with Disk Utility, I discovered a set of steps that will allow you to have as many partitions as you like in addition to BootCamp.