The Tilden Diary: On Getting Started With Guide-Dog #3

I went to Guiding Eyes For The Blind (GEB, NY) for guide-dog #3 in July 2011. I returned home to California with Tilden (~n) Labrador, an effusive young male Labrador on July 23, 2011. Tilden completed his final week of training on the Google campus in Mountain View and graduated on July 30, 2011.

This diary details the period from leaving home for Guiding Eyes July 11 to the day that Tilden completed his guide-dog training. Here is a photo album of pictures taken during this period.

Here is the The Tilden Diary, covering the advent of Tilden Labrador in words and pictures.

Emacs Lisp Advice, Aspect Oriented Programming And Beautiful Code

Beautiful Code is a forthcoming publication from O'Reilly Media that brings together a collection of essays on software design. It includes a chapter on Emacspeak --- a speech-enabling extension built using Lisp's advice facility. Emacspeak provides an interesting study in the use of Aspect Oriented Programming to add spoken feedback to a large software system (Emacs) without changing any of the underlying Emacs source code. Note that Lisp's advice facility was the prime motivator behind Aspect Oriented Programming. Advice in Lisp, and the technique of Aspect Oriented Programming in general provides a pragmatic solution to the problem of implementing additional cross-cutting concerns such as adding spoken feedback to large software systems. This form of implementation is also a practical yet powerful means to discover extension points in large codebases.

Announcing Google Group emacs-g-client

I've created a Google Group for discussing package G-Client at Emacs-G-Client. If you are using this package, please subscribe to and use this group for discussing features/bugs. Note that the code is in active development; I plan to release an update in the next few weeks, and in the meantime, feedback on the SVN version would be useful in identifying bugs that have slipped in.

Updates To G-Client

Since it's initial release in early March, I've checked many updates to G-Client --- my Emacs client for accessing Google Services. If you use this client with Google Calendar, you might want to grab the latest snapshot from SVN. Recently, Google Calendar started using HTTPS exclusively, and that is one of the changes that I checked in earlier this week. Once you upgrade, you might also need to clean out any previously cached cookies in file ~/.g-cookie-jar before things work correctly again.

Updates To G-Client

Since announcing package G-Client a couple of weeks ago, I've checked in a few updates at the SVN repository as summarized below. I'll hold off from making intermediate releases as packaged tarballs.

Summary Of Recent Updates

• All interactions with the server now use utf-8 as the process encoding.
• The calendar module can now quick add events.
• Fixed an url-encoding bug when specifying time values during event creation.

And other minor fixes too numerous to fit in this margin ...

Blogging From Emacs -- Emacs 21.4 Tips

I announced package g-client on Friday. Since then, a couple of users have reported issues with it, all of which can be traced back to the fact that I run Emacs-22 (CVS Emacs) by default.

My friend Leigh Klotz has written up the issues he ran into; Here are fixes along with explanations.

cus-load.el

This file contains automatically generated autoload definitions for customization options. Emacs 22 lets one specify the name of the generated file --- and step make config uses that to produce g-cus-load.el. Under emacs21, the make config step produces that file, but under the name cus-load.el for now, renaming that file to g-cus-load.el should do the trick.

Browser

Package g relies on Emacs' browse-url package to hand off HTML pages to the browser of choice. Customize option browse-url-browser-function lets you pick the browser you want. If you like living entirely in Emacs, I recommend emacs/W3m. Emadcs/W3 also works --- though it's harder to get going under Emacs 21.

Blogging From Inside Emacs

From The Everything Can Be Done In Emacs Dept:

See Emacs Blogger for details on an updated Emacs module for blogging using the new Blogger API. This replaces the now obsolete atom-blogger released in early 2006 for blogging using the old Blogger API. Emacs Blogger is part of a large suite of Emacs clients to Google Services that I have been developing; you can find more details on my Emacspeak blog post. I originally developed this client for use within Emacspeak, but there is no Emacspeak dependency in the code --- if you're an Emac suser who knows that Emacs is a more productive environment than a browser, then this is for you!