Things to remember when setting up sound in Ubuntu Linux on a Sony Vaio U1:

• modprobe trident
• modprobe snd_trident
• Be very very thorough with alsamixer settings. For some brain-dead reason, all the important stuff is muted.

On Technorati: linux, ubuntu, laptop

I have a tiny laptop: 8.9" diagonally. With a 1024x768 pixels screen resolution, things can get *pretty* small. The following functions use the gnome-terminal-style shortcuts (Ctrl-plus, Ctrl-minus) to change the font size without the mouse:

(defun sacha/increase-font-size ()
  (interactive)
  (set-face-attribute 'default
                      nil
                      :height
                      (ceiling (* 1.10
                                  (face-attribute 'default :height)))))
(defun sacha/decrease-font-size ()
  (interactive)
  (set-face-attribute 'default
                      nil
                      :height
                      (floor (* 0.9
                                  (face-attribute 'default :height)))))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-+") 'sacha/increase-font-size)
(global-set-key (kbd "C--") 'sacha/decrease-font-size)

On Technorati: emacs, pimpmyemacs

Quinn Fung needed some help with Muse and RDF so that she could easily generate RSS feeds from Emacs, so we declared today to be Emacs Clinic day at the Linux Caffe.

We started by getting publishing to work. We then figured out how to get RDF to publish, and that was pretty okay too.

Quinn needed multiple authors, and muse-journal didn't support it yet, so we hacked it in. I told her to pick a syntax, and I added code to make it happen. It took us a while to track things down, but it turned out to be a reasonably easy addition. (I need to refactor that code sometime... that's a really long function!)

Along the way, we found a bug in muse-journal. Muse-journal summarizes entries by taking the first two sentences, but dies when the post doesn't contain at least two periods. I spent a fair bit of time tracing through the different changes we made before realizing that it wasn't my bug. I probably would've found it earlier, but debug-on-error wasn't getting honored. Odd. Anyway, here's the patch, which I'll submit to GNA when I get back into the swing of things:

--- orig/lisp/muse-journal.el
+++ mod/lisp/muse-journal.el
@@ -570,7 +570,9 @@
           (let ((beg (point)))
             (if (muse-style-element :summarize)
                 (progn
-                  (forward-sentence 2)
+                  (condition-case err
+                      (forward-sentence 2)
+                    (error (goto-char (point-min))))
                   (setq desc (concat (buffer-substring beg (point)) "...")))
               (save-restriction
                 (muse-publish-markup-buffer "rss-entry" "html")

Now Quinn's jumping feet-first into Lisp development by doing the Atom implementation. muse-atom does single-entry Atom files, but she can model it on muse-journal's RSS implementation.

I also helped Ian set up a very very basic Planner. It reminded me that I *really* need to package planner-bundle again, and either retire or update plannerlove. In fact, I need to set up scripts so that it's ridiculously easy to keep up to date...

I miss hacking on Emacs! This is fun. I'll reconfigure my kernel and get VPN working. Then I'll set up my Emacs development environment again...

On Technorati: emacs, pimpmyemacs

At some point in time, I think I should go for figuring out how to do my mail properly so that I can have sacha@sachachua.com on my outgoing mail. Jijo currently generously hosts my mail, but I should look into properly paying for it like the rest of the civilized world. <laugh>