This Week’s Program: July 3 - July 7

Not gonna lie, fam. I did not care much about computers this week. This week was the Fourth of July here in the United States of America and I was feeling those summer vibes. I took the Fourth off from my coding streak and just managed to squeeze in a couple of commits throughout the week.

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Experimenting with some Emacs stuff I thought “hey I know what I’ll do I’ll just update all of my packages”. First mistake, bozo. On Monday I made a commit to try to fix some stuff that had all of a sudden popped up. Like the Emacs tool bar. Get out of here tool bar I don’t want you! (tool-bar-mode -1).

Later on I realized that the better-defaults package was updated and now I have to explicitly require it.

While I’m writing this tinyletter I’ve also found that the Markdown package was updated and now I have to get into a new habit for creating links. Why do you change your interface Emacs packages?! Lesson learned: never update anything.

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I further flesh out gstreamer/caps.rkt and add some helper functions for quickly creating capsfilters. Capsfilters are used everywhere in GStreamer and their job is to refine what is flowing through the pipeline. You use capsfilters to say “the data moving through here ought to be raw video at this framerate and this aspect ratio” and GStreamer negotiates capabilities on the upstream and downstream elements to make sure they can fulfill that contract.

One of the helper functions I create is the (video/x-raw) function which creates capsfilters just for sending video around. Next week, I’m going to pick this thread up and evolve this gstreamer module into a well-behaved, idiomatic Racket library that has handy functions just like this.

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For some reason I got a bee in my bonnet and decided I needed to really jam on some LaTeX. I was like “I need to typeset something in really high quality and make it look like a scientific paper.” “I need to waste a huge amount of time going in depth to learn yet another markup language to produce PDF’s that make me look like I have some scientific credibility,” I thought. So I started down this miserable road for whatever reason.

I installed AUCTeX, which is, I suppose just the thing for stuff like this, but I still can’t figure out what it adds. I also make sure to add the directory that MacTeX puts all of its executables to my exec-path:

(add-to-list 'exec-path "/Library/TeX/texbin/")

I do this in Emacs and not in my shell’s $PATH because I don’t want that stuff cluttering around in there!

After all this rigmarole I can turn a LaTeX buffer into a PDF. Big whoop. I’ll be sticking with the quite good ShareLaTeX for now but why I’ve decided I really need to learn the ins and outs of TeX is quite beyond me. I guess my subconscious just really wants a markdown language to produce quality typeset documents!

Next week I hope to shift some focus back on Overscan and try to accomplish a couple of things:

• Start making the gstreamer module something with actual utility.
• Documentation with Scribble.

Until then I’m all about those summer vibes.

🎆 Mark