Blog
Reverse-chronological numbering for publication lists in \(\LaTeX\) and with citeproc.el
Published: April 06, 2025
One thing that always bothered me about my CV and publications page was that although I managed to list my publications in reverse chronological order, i.e., with the newest publications at the top, the numbering of the list of publications was still ascending. So, until now, my publication list was something like:
1. 2025 publication 2. 2024 publication 3. 2022 publication
I found this annoying because as soon as a new publication is added to the list, the number labels of all other publications had to change. The correct way to do this is to use reverse-chronological sorting and descending numbering, i.e., what we want is:
3. 2025 publication 2. 2024 publication 1. 2022 publication
I finally got around to fixing this, but I don't particularly love my implementation. I'll blog about it regardless.
Semi-Open Heart Protocol
Published: February 01, 2025
About a week ago, the Open Heart Protocol made its way to the front page of Hacker News. I immediately thought that this looked like a lot of fun and a cool opportunity to add some more bells and whistles to this website. There is a public API, but the devs (muan and robb) also provide some code examples to self-host the backend using the Cloudflare Workers free tier. Since I am already using Cloudflare for this website, I figured I'd give this a try. Surprising absolutely no-one, I had to add some slight customizations to my setup.
Using Emacs and Org-mode as a static site generator
Published: December 29, 2024
For reasons that I don't yet fully understand, I spend a considerable amount of time during the holidays tweaking and updating this website. The resulting static site generator has now grown in complexity to a point where my previous posts are woefully outdated and rather confusing to read. So why not make an updated "This is how this site is built" post for the year 2025? Alright, saddle up.
HTTP Basic Authentication for personal package.el repositories
Published: December 17, 2024
In my somewhat convoluted system to manage Emacs packages, I maintain a personal ELPA-compatible package repository (created using an ancient version of elpa-mirror) on this very server. Because these are my packages, I don't want to run this as a public-facing repository and I thus protect access to it using HTTP Basic authentication. For about five years, I was able to use this password-protected package repository by setting the package-archives variable to include the username and password in the URL, e.g., something like:
(setq package-archives '(("my-repo" . "https://username:[email protected]")))
This special form of URL is now apparently being deprecated and I have noticed that recent versions of Emacs (I'm guessing 29+) do not support this URL scheme any more. I don't really know the details about these URLs, but some cursory googling produced some notes on the topic (cf. Dan Q, Neil Madden). Luckily, due to Emacs' flexibility, I was able to find a solution to this problem relatively quickly. As a bonus, this solution actually does HTTP Basic Auth right.
Custom org-sitemap-function post-Org 9.1
Published: December 27, 2022
I have been lugging around an old version of org-mode (9.0 to be specific) in the git repo which builds this website for a number of years now. I decided to do this because I had a custom org-sitemap-function to generate the landing page for my blog, but org 9.1 introduced a breaking change to the org-publish API.
I have now finally come around to fixing this issue and making my website compatible with modern emacs and org-mode versions higher than 9.1. However, porting my old sitemap function was… surprisingly difficult? So just in case someone is looking up my original post these days, this post contains a sitemap-function which will work in 2022.
Emacs Config Redux
Published: April 24, 2020
I used to keep a HTMLized version of my Emacs config on this website for folks to browse. However, during my last larger config overhaul, I changed things up so much that simply exporting one file and putting it on the website was not possible anymore and the link to my config silently 404'ed.
Since then, I have received multiple requests to re-upload the config file. I kept promising folks that I would one day get to doing that. That day has now finally come.
Took a few hours of cleanup and writing, but the config is now back online in all its glory. There is also extensive commentary, in case you are interested.
Beamer Poster templates using (some) Purdue Colors
Published: October 02, 2018
During the Advanced LaTeX workshop we taught at Purdue last week, I announced that I would share my poster design using the beamerposter package and a similar design as the slides. I finally came around to uploading a few examples to my GitHub account (thanks for being patient, everyone)—you can find them here.
Towards a better Integration of the Julia REPL in Emacs
Published: July 18, 2017
It is not a secret that I am a fan of both Emacs and the Julia language. Even
though I have not been working with Julia a lot recently, I still try to keep
up to date with the language and use it in my research and other projects
whenever it fits. It should also not be a secret that I am a big fan of the
Emacs Way™ of working with interpreted languages, which involves the idea of
controlling a REPL without leaving the editor. It was for those and other
reasons that I initially hacked together julia-shell-mode (See my blog post
about it here), but if you take a closer look at the open isses in GitHub and
the overall lack of commits, you might sense that I have lost interest in this
package. Of course, the reality behind my lack of enthusiasm for
julia-shell-mode is a little more complicated.
ZeroMQ Pub/Sub Hello World
Published: June 28, 2017
It's been a while since I posted some new content on here. This is mostly because I've been quite busy trying to be an academic at Purdue. This blog will get an update soon with a few publications!
Anyways, I've been working a LOT with C++ recently, side-by-side with (and guided by) my labmates Tomo and Stephen. (Expect a post about the perfect emacs setup for C++ development soon, but here's a hint: it involves the usual suspects rtags and ycmd) As part of our project, I am currently surveying a few methods for inter-thread and inter-process communication, which seems to be what ZeroMQ was created for.
Archive
- 2016-04-11: Reducing the size of GNOME 3.20's titlebars
- 2016-03-12: Extending your X11 Desktop using VNC
- 2016-03-04: Some matrix multiplication tricks
- 2016-02-01: Blogging using org-mode (and nothing else)
- 2015-09-27: Julia + Emacs = Success
- 2015-07-22: SSH Usernames
- 2015-07-06: Variable-width Serif Fonts when editing plain text in Emacs
- 2015-07-01: ctmpmon
- 2015-06-10: My Emacs configuration
- 2015-06-05: Remotely updating iTunes and MPD at the same time
- 2015-06-01: Creating beautiful polar coordinate plots in MATLAB
- 2015-03-16: Editor Macros
- 2015-01-31: The fish shell
- 2015-01-27: Creating a custom Linux Live USB environment
- 2015-01-22: No one man should have all that power
- 2015-01-20: All roads lead to Rome
- 2015-01-19: Hello, World!