Emacs 24.1 Fourth Pretest out

The fourth pretest of what will be Emacs 24.1 is out. The Windows binaries are also out.

Emacs 23.4 Released

GNU Emacs 23.4 which fixes a security flaw in EDE, along with other bug fixes has been released .

It's not Coincidence, it's Providence!

Browsing my local paper, found this little gem tucked away in a small article.  This year is the 125th birthday celebrations of mathematical genius Ramanujan, so The Hindu runs lots of maths related stuff as well as vignettes about Ramanujan, this year.  Here's a weird but nice clip from the article.

A tale Robert Kanigel repeated a couple of times during his recent visit to Madras to launch the 125th birthday celebrations of mathematical genius Ramanujan related to his first visit to Madras in 1988 to start following the Ramanujan trail on the ground as he got down to working on the mathematician's biography.


That November day he landed from London was a bandh day in Madras and the airport was virtually deserted. There was a lone auto rickshaw with a passenger in it and another person haggling to get aboard. That person was Viswanathan Venkataraman, who had also arrived from London. When he noticed the forlorn foreigner wondering what he should do, Viswanathan told him that the only way to get to the city was to squeeze in with them. And Kanigal joined them for that ride in a sardine tin.


During the ride, Viswanathan discovered that Kanigal was not a tourist but a well known writer who was working on Ramanujan's biography. “What a coincidence,” remarked Viswanathan, “I am the grandson of S. Narayana Aiyar with whom Ramanujan worked in the Port Trust.” No, it's not coincidence, it's Providence, a surprised Kanigal enthusiastically replied. And so began Kanigal's first steps in Madras that led to The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan.

A quick round up on Org, Emacs 23.4 news

Looks like I'll be busy for the next couple of weeks on work related stuff.  Here's some newsworthy posts from various mailing lists.

Konrad Hinsen has posted a patch for org-mode for IMAP support for VM links in orgmode.  Possibly of interest only to VM users.

Due to a security issue, there will be a Emacs 23.4 release in the next week or so, here's the announcement of the first release candidate by Chong Yidong.

Sending Emails with Attachments from the Command Line Revisited

Previously I had posted about trying to send attachment emails from the command line here and here.  But the hitch was, every time I changed computers(which while infrequent) I still had to download and compile mpack and install it every time.

On a whim, when I asked on the cygwin mailing list, I was asked to try the Email package.  And I have to report it works beautifully.  It needs an MTA to connect to the mail server, for which there is msmtp and is part of the Cygwin packaged utilities already.   That sort of solves my portability issue.

Configuring Email was simple.  Edit the email.conf file with the following minimum details and you're set.


############################################################
SENDMAIL_BIN = '/usr/sbin/msmtp -t'
MY_NAME  = 'Sivaram '
MY_EMAIL = 'nnsivaram.nnet@gmail.com'
#REPLY_TO = ''
USE_TLS = 'true'
TEMP_DIR = '/tmp'
SMTP_AUTH = 'LOGIN'
SMTP_AUTH_USER = ' nnsivaram.nnet' 

And you call it in the shell script as follows


    echo "Mailing... $mailid with $attachfile"


    /usr/bin/email  -s "Mailed report on `date`" -a $attachfile  $mailid < $mbody
    echo "email Return code is $?"

The github repo can be found here.

C gave you "Hello World" while Haskell....

gives you

ghci> filter (`elem` ['A'..'Z']) "i lauGh At You BecAuse u r aLL the Same"
"GAYBALLS"

Cue me, laughing like a juvenile, suddenly, in office. 

But on a more serious note, learnyouahaskell.com teaches 

you Haskell, a FP language.  

New Emacs version(23.4) to be released due to security flaw in CEDET

Apparently, there's a security flaw in CEDET's code that allows arbitrary execution of code.  To fix it, the Emacs maintainers are going to release a new version of Emacs 23.3 with the patch as Emacs 23.4.

You can read more about it here.