Archive for November, 2007
If you’ve upgraded to Leopard, and you’re an Emacs user, you may have found that typing emacs in a term no longer works — you get “Fatal malloc_jumpstart() error”. This will be the case if you’re using something like Fink or Darwin Ports, but it may also be the case if the upgrade didn’t quite work out.
The builds in Fink and Darwin Ports are currently broken; but otherwise, you have a few options to get Emacs back:
Use the Emacs that comes with Leopard. All this solution involves is making sure that any custom binary isn’t on the path — remove or move /sw/bin/emacs or /opt/local/bin/emacs (or possibly even /usr/local/bin/emacs) and make sure /usr/bin/emacs is the one installed with Leopard — /usr/bin/emacs –version should tell you the version is “22.1.1″.
The problem with the Emacs shipped with Leopard is that it’s built with no X support (or Carbon, for that matter)(although it does have Carbon support — see below).
Use Aquamacs. Aquamacs has precompiled binaries which work with Leopard. But, beware, it is quite different from Emacs in some ways — if you used Emacs before you used MacOS X, you probably won’t like it.
Compile your own Emacs. This is what I did. The stock 22.1 source distribution won’t build in Leopard; it gives up the ghost with a message “Assertion failed: (filesize <= ranges->size)”. However there is an unofficial patch, which worked for me. I’m going to keep my custom emacs until fink or ports catches up.
In summary (adapted slightly from here):
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/emacs-22.1.tar.gz
tar xvzf emacs-22.1.tar.gz
cd emacs-22.1
curl -O http://ephemera.continuation.org/patches/emacs-leopard-unexec.patch
patch -p0 < emacs-leopard-unexec.patch
./configure --without-carbon --with-x --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
I put the result in /usr/local and made sure /usr/local/bin was on my path before any of the other possibilities, while I wait for Fink or Ports to catch up.
UPDATE: Thanks to masklinn’s comment below, I can present another option which I’d overlooked:
Use carbonised Emacs. If you want to run Emacs in its own window, but don’t want X11, there is a ready-made .app wrapper in the source distribution. The disk image, which masklinn suggests, has patches and some very useful bundled Elisp packages, like nxml-mode.
You can also use the emacs distributed with Leopard with the .app wrapper, as jfb points out (see the second comment below); or, compile your own carbonised Emacs, similar to what I did above: change the configure invocation
./configure --with-carbon --without-x
make
cp -R mac/Emacs.app ./
cp src/emacs Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/
sudo mv Emacs.app /Applications/
Either way gives you an Emacs that behaves like a MacOSX app and doesn’t need X11 to run.
November 27th, 2007
mikeb
A few days ago, in Squaring Zooko’s Triangle, I sketched out a proposal for a new naming scheme which to a limited extent achieved all of the contradictory-seeming aims set out in Zooko’s Triangle. Having discussed the essay with a few folk since, it seems like it might be worthwhile trying to clarify the ideas behind it.
Continue Reading November 21st, 2007
Paul Crowley
Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang, paid LShift a visit on Friday. He had kindly agreed to give a short talk to a few of my colleagues. We ended up cramming about twenty people into our meeting room, listening to Joe explain the implications of multicore CPU architectures for programming language design. There were lots of questions from the audience and some interesting discussions, keeping us a all occupied for nearly two hours. Matthew Sackman has posted his thoughts on some of the key points.
We covered a range of other topics too, including Joe’s recent idea of an Erlang/OTP Service Pack. This will be on a shorter release cycle than the main Erlang/OTP distribution, allowing changes and new features to be brought to a wide audience more quickly, with the best bits, hopefully, eventually making it into OTP.
November 17th, 2007
matthias
Sam Ruby examines support for astral-plane characters in various JSON implementations. His post prompted me to check my Erlang implementation of rfc4627. I found that for astral plane characters in utf-8, utf-16, or utf-32, everything worked properly, but the RFC4627-mandated surrogate-pair “\uXXXX” encodings broke. A few minutes hacking later, and:
Eshell V5.5.5 (abort with ^G)
1> {ok, Utf8Encoded, []} =
rfc4627:decode("\"\\u007a\\u6c34\\ud834\\udd1e\"").
{ok,<<122,230,176,180,240,157,132,158>>,[]}
2> xmerl_ucs:from_utf8(Utf8Encoded).
[122,27700,119070]
3> rfc4627:encode(Utf8Encoded).
[34,122,230,176,180,240,157,132,158,34]
4>
Much better.
You can get the updated code using mercurial:
hg clone http://hg.opensource.lshift.net/erlang-rfc4627/
November 16th, 2007
tonyg
In this essay I propose a kind of name which is entirely decentralized, reasonably secure, and at least somewhat memorable. They look like this:
Paul_Crowley:area-fluid-above-movie-start
Continue Reading November 10th, 2007
Paul Crowley
NDocProc, our small and simple .NET javadoc-like documentation generator, has been updated for C# 2.0 and Generics.
Changes since the previous announcement include:
- Support for generics, nested types, arrays, delegates, events, and the intersection of them all.
- Now requires .NET 2.0 or Mono 2.0 to build.
- Support for slightly more of the XML documentation language used in .NET documentation comments.
- Better formatting of namespace pages, and summaries on the main index page.
The project homepage is here. You can download a zip of the latest version, or use darcs to check out the repository:
darcs get http://www.lshift.net/~tonyg/ndocproc/
November 7th, 2007
tonyg