Entries in Life

Since emacs on Linux can use DBus calls now, I wrote a short notify.el as a demonstration to myself and to save myself from forking notify-send (because, uh, forking is bad) whenever someone mentions my nick in IRC. There is a delay built into it so that your “friends” on IRC can’t DDOS you with notifications. Oh, the really nifty thing about this is the function keywords-to-properties. elisp keywords (:example) allow you to fake named parameters in function calls. This is done a couple of different places in Emacs, the most visible being defcustom. But there isn’t any universal way that I could find to parse the keyword-value pairs into something usable. So I cribbed from defcustom and wrote something that I hope will be useful to others.

I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time editting MediaWiki wikis, so I’ve had some time to put together a better MediaWiki mode for emacs. In the process, I wrote some code that many people (myself included) seem to think Emacs needs. HTTP POSTing in native elisp is too hard right now, so a http-post-simple.el was written. The original mediawiki.el required this library, but it wasn’t included. I refactored the dependency away and now I have some form parsing functions in elisp that I can contribute back to the Emacs core. Anyway, if you use Emacs and edit MediaWiki pages, check out mediawiki.el and let me know what you think. I’m especially interested in bug reports from anyone.