A reader of this blog kindly pointed out that my instructions for building Emacs 25.1 on Ubuntu 16.10 result in a core dump when the build process bootstraps emacs. I only tested the instructions on 16.04 so I hadn’t run into this issue yet.

The core dump on 16.10 appears to be a known issue and there is a workaround. Instead of running configure with just the prefix argument, run it as follows:

Now that GNU Emacs 25.1 has been released, it is time for my customary “how to install Emacs 25.1 on a recent Ubuntu” post. In my case I’m using XUbuntu 16.04, but the instructions are pretty much the same for just about every recent Ubuntu version. The package versions of the referenced packages differ, but the package names haven’t changed since I first published one of these posts.

This blog is self-hosted, together with some other services on a FreeBSD virtual server over at RootBSD. Yes, I’m one of those weirdos who hosts their own servers - even if they’re virtual - instead of just using free or buying services.

I recently had to migrate from the old server instance I’ve been using since 2010 to a new, shiny FreeBSD 10 server. That prompted a review of various packages I use via the FreeBSD ports collection and most importantly, resulted in a decision to upgrade from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0 “while we’re in there”.

I switched jobs in October last year and getting up to speed in the new role did take priority over anything else, so I had to put a few other endeavours including this blog on hold for a little while.

The publishing frequency will still be lower than previously, but as I have moved from a mostly managerial role back to a pure software engineering role, I will be able to post more articles in line with the original intent of the blog, ie more C++-related articles and of course, the usual smattering of “look what cool feature I found in Emacs”.

The Hack 2.0 font got a lot of attention recently as a font specifically designed for use with source code. So of course I had to try it out in Emacs. I started with installing it on Mac OS X as that’s the OS I use most for work and work - like activities.

As a lot of people keep pointing out over and over again, a job ad is an ad. Its often forgotten purpose is to get someone competent excited enough about your company and the job opening you’re trying to fill to send in a well crafted resume with a well crafted cover email[^1].

I’ve moved from using Apache as a web server to nginx for various projects. The machines I’m running these projects on are a somewhat resource constrained and nginx deals with low resource machines much better than Apache does and tends to serve content faster in those circumstances. For example switching the machine that hosts this WordPress blog from Apache and mod_php to nginx with php-fpm improved the pingdom load times on this blog by about 30% with no other changes.

Artur Malabarba over on Endless Parentheses has a short post about embedding a YouTube video directly from org-mode. I haven’t tried using it in org2blog yet, but I’m hoping/expecting that it’ll work there, too.

It’s a very timely post as I’ve got a couple of Emacs related short video tutorials planned that would really benefit from being directly embedded on the blog here.

I’ve recently switched to using homebrew as my source for Emacs on OS X  after seeing this blog post by Philip Ingram.

It’s a simple way to install a current Emacs once or twice a year. I don’t use beta versions or other pre-release versions, only released versions. My editor is too important a tool for me to risk using pre-release versions.

I recently blogged about Google and Samsung starting to offer regular security patches for their Android devices.

Over on ars technica, Ron Amadeo has an interesting article describing why the current Android ecosystem is not conducive to the quick and widespread distribution of security fixes and why this needs to change, urgently.

At this point in time it seems that in order to be halfway secure, one has to basically root the phone and run well-tested and well supported distribution like CyanogenMod. While I - and presumably most, if not all, readers of this blog - certainly have the technical know how and abilities to root a phone, that’s a poor approach to security because most people either will not or cannot root their phones.