I’ve been experimenting with converting this blog to Jekyll or another static blog generator. I’m sticking with Jekyll at the moment due to its ease of use and its plugin environment. The main idea behind this is to reduce the resource consumption and hopefully also speed up the delivery of the blog. In fact, there is a static version of the blog available right now, even though it’s kinda pre-alpha and not always up to date. The Jekyll version also doesn’t have the comments set up yet nor does it have a theme I like, so it’s still very much work in slow progress.

To export the contents from WordPress to Jekyll I use the surprisingly named WordPress to Jekyll exporter plugin. This plugin dumps the whole WordPress data including pictures into a zip file in a format that is mostly markdown grokked by Jekyll. It doesn’t convert all the links to markdown, so the generated files need some manual cleanup. One problem I keep running into is that the exporter dumps out certain UTF-8 character entities as their numerical code. Unfortunately when processing the data with Jekyll afterwards, those UTF-8 entities get turned into strings that are displayed as is. Please note I’m not complaining about this functionality, I’d rather have this information preserved so I can rework it later on. So I wrote a script to help with this task.

I haven’t used Ubuntu much recently after switching several systems to Manjaro, but had to set up a laptop with XUbuntu 17.04. That came with Emacs 24.5 as the default emacs package, and as skeeto pointed out in the comments, with a separate emacs25 package for Emacs 25.1. I tend to run the latest release Emacs everywhere out of habit, so I revisited my build instructions to build a current Emacs on Ubuntu and its derivates. The good news is that in thanks to some changes in the Emacs build, the build is as straightforward as it used to be prior to the combination of Ubuntu 16.10 and Emacs 25.1. In other words, no need to remember to switch off PIE as was necessary when building GNU Emacs 25.1 on Ubuntu 16.10.

This is a post I wrote several years ago and it’s been languishing in my drafts folder ever since. I’m not working on this particular codebase any more. That said, the problems caused by using Java-like getter and setter functions as the sole interface to the object in the context described in the post have a bigger impact these days as they will also affect move construction and move assignment. While I’m not opposed to using getter and setter functions in C++ in general, I am opposed to using them as the only member access method and especially in this particular context where they had to be used to initialise class members that were complex objects themselves.

We all love the odd debugging story, so I finally sat down and wrote up how I debugged a configuration issue that got in the way of the iOS mail app’s ability to retrieve email while I was on the go.

tl;dr - iOS Mail uses IPV6 to access you email server when the server supports IPV6 and doesn’t fall back to IPV4 if the IPV6 connection attempt fails. If if fails, you don’t get an error, but you don’t get any email either.

The long story of why I sporadically couldn’t access my email from the iOS 10 Mail app

Somewhere around the time of upgrading my iPhone 6 to iOS 10 or even iOS 10.2, I lost the ability to check my email using the built-in iOS Mail app over an LTE connection. I am not really able to nail down the exact point in time was because I used Spark for a little while on my phone. Spark is a very good email app and I like it a lot, but it turned out that I’m not that much of an email power user on the go. I didn’t really need Spark as Apple had added the main reason for my Spark usage to the built-in Mail app. In case you’re wondering, it’s the heuristics determining which folder you want to move an email to that allow both Spark and now Mail to suggest a usually correct destination folder when you want to move the message.

Turns out I made some unnecessary “work” for myself when I tried to add support for command history to inf-mongo. As Mickey over at Mastering Emacs points out in a blog post, comint mode already comes with M-n and M-p mapped to comint-next-input and comint-previous-input. And of course they work in inf-mongo right out of the box. I still prefer using M-up and M-down, plus I learned a bit about sparse key maps and general interaction with comint-mode. So from that perspective, no time was wasted although it wasn’t strictly necessary to put in the work.

I’m spending a lot of time in the MongoDB shell at the moment, so of course I went to see if someone had built an Emacs mode to support the MongoDB shell. Google very quickly pointed me at endofunky’s inf-mongo mode, which implements a basic shell interaction mode with MongoDB using comint. We have a winner, well, almost. The mode does exactly what it says on the tin, but I wanted a little more, namely being able to scroll through my command history. Other repl modes like Cider have this functionality already, so it couldn’t be too hard to implement, could it?

A problem archivists have been bringing up for a while now is that with the majority of content going digital and the pace of change in storage mechanisms and formats, it’s becoming harder to preserve content even when it is not what would be considered old by the standards of other historic documents created by humanity.

Case in point - the efforts required to preserve even recent movies as described in this article on IEEE Spectrum. As the article mentions, we’ve already lost access to 90% of US movies made during the silent area and about 50% of movies made before 1950. I suspect that the numbers for the European film industry might be even worse thanks to World War 2. However, keep in mind that those are numbers for movies stored on a more durable medium (and yes, I know that the early nitrate film is about as flammable as they come).

Update II - 2019-05-07: It looks like due to the recent licensing changes, the Java 8 JDK that brew used is not directly accessible anymore and likely behind some kind of paywall. The installation method described below will still work as it uses the non-versioned java cask, which installs the latest version of OpenJDK.

_Update: The title of this post isn’t quite correct as using the homebrew cask mentioned in this blog post will install the current major version of the Oracle JDK. If you want to install a specific major version of the JDK (6 or 8 at the time of writing), I describe how to do that in this new blog post.

I’ve blogged about getting Manjaro Linux to work with my AMD RX 470 before. The method described in that post got my AMD RX 470 graphics card working with the default 4.4 kernel. This worked fine - with the usual caveats regarding VESA software rendering - until I tried to upgrade to newer versions of the kernel.

My understanding is that the 4.4 kernel series doesn’t include drivers for the relatively recent AMD RX 470 GPUs, whereas later kernel series (4.8 and 4.9 specifically) do. Unfortunately trying to boot into a 4.9 kernel resulted in the X server locking up so well that even the usual Alt-Fx didn’t get me to a console to fix the problem.

My adventures with Manjaro Linux continue and I’ve even moved my “craptop” - a somewhat ancient Lenovo X240 that I use as a semi-disposable travel laptop - from XUbuntu to Manjaro Linux. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Today, I wanted to write about package download performance issues I started encountering on my desktop recently and how I managed to fix them.

I was trying to install terminator this morning and kept getting errors from Pamac that the downloads timed out. Looking at the detailed output, I noticed it was trying to download the packages from a server in South Africa, which isn’t exactly in my neighbourhood. Pamac doesn’t appear to have an obvious way to update the mirror list like the Ubuntu flavours do, but a quick dive into the command line helped me fix the issue.