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.

Read More…

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.

Read More…

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.

Read More…

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.

Read More…

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.

Read More…

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.

Read More…

Published: May 19, 2016

I've gotten a few requests to share my custom Purdue-themed beamer templates recently and I finally came around to clean them up, put them in individual .sty-files, and upload them to GitHub.

The GitHub repository contains some examples to use the two templates I have been using for talks and presentations over the last few semesters. The first (and IMHO better) template is beamer-purdue-gold and the title page looks like this:

Read More…

Published: April 11, 2016

GNOME 3.20 has made it into the official Arch Linux repositories and with it came—as usual—some sort of breakage. I personally find the default width of the titlebars repulsive, and I used a small CSS hack to fix them. This broke, but thanks to reddit, I managed to fix it. Put the following in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (create the file if it does not exist):

Read More…

Published: March 12, 2016

I love multihead setups and I am a thrifty grad student. Today, this combination lead to an interesting and fun Saturday morning project. I figured out how to add an additional monitor to my dual-monitor set-up, which is already a little convoluted.

Let me clear things up: My main setup currently consists of a Thinkpad with its lid closed connected to two monitors (one over VGA, one over DisplayPort). Since my laptop has no third physical display connector, I had to get creative in order to add a third physical monitor to my set-up.

I use a cheap DisplayLink adapter at home for exactly this reason, but unfortunately the official dirvers are buggy and the whole set-up is generally very unreliable. So, with me being the thrifty grad student that I am, I did not want to shell out another $30 for a piece of hardware that doesn't even really work.

What I ended up doing is pretty neat.

Read More…

Archive