Author: grant

Drop of water

A drop of water struggles so hard to return to the ocean. The ocean welcomes it
back with open arms. That is not the time for the ocean, with all of its magnitude
and unlimited beauty and kindness, to remind the drop that it came from the ocean,
left up into the atmosphere, and to came the Earth to serve it, and it is natural for it to
eventually come home, and that the ocean was waiting the whole time.

The story

The creativity that you apply and capture to assemble your system… this is where
all of the fun stuff is. Let me elaborate, everything in your artifacts are
valuable because they tell the story. Actually, they tell the story about a
story, a story that has yet to occur and also a story that has previously
occurred. It is here, where the actions lives, that all of those things are
learned, practiced, suffered accordingly from, and reveled in! In other words,
it is yet another story, a fun one.

If you haven’t noticed by now, either by hearing rumors, reading accounts, or
learning of it yourself: human beings are story-oriented. Your ability to
successfully function in and contribute to society will be directly proportional
to your ability to listen to stories, tell others’ stories, live your life such
that you have new stories to tell, and capture them in some form of persistent
storage. Stories grant us the power to learn from others wisdom that was
painfully acquired thousands of years ago, and it gives you a chance to
contribute the results of your hard work, for the future of humanity, too. A
belief system about the value of story-telling is essential, critical, and
mandatory to successfully achieve your goals with literate programming.

As I change, the story will change, and the action will change. The cycle will
never end.

Nevertheless, I will attempt to do my best here with the good part of me being
a flawless, rational, and logical human being to:

  • Deliver a supportable system
  • Deliver an adaptable system
  • Deliver an expandable system

The perennial fear revealed by a rules engine

When seeking to attain mastery of rules engines (RE), you will experience an odd phenomenon. Others, upon hearing some details of your course of study, will react in a what initially appears to be a manner angrily dismissive of the topic itself. This is strange given the fundamental role that computation plays in literally everything we do, from a manifest perspective, with hardware computers, organic computers, and other.
Upon further interaction, and reflection, it quickly becomes apparent what motivates this reaction is fundamentally, the re-experience of a long inaccessible, perennial fear.
Continue reading “The perennial fear revealed by a rules engine”

A tiny org-mode literate programming Makefile

Basic build for a document:

INIT=.emacs.el
$(INIT): TC3F.org
	caffeinate -s time emacs --batch --no-init-file --load .org-mode.emacs.el --find-file TC3F.org --funcall org-babel-tangle --kill
TC3F.txt: $(INIT)
	caffeinate -s time emacs --batch --no-init-file --load .org-mode.emacs.el --find-file TC3F.org --funcall org-ascii-export-to-ascii --kill
TC3F.html: $(INIT)
	caffeinate -s time emacs --batch --no-init-file --load .org-mode.emacs.el --find-file TC3F.org --funcall org-html-export-to-html --kill
TC3F.pdf: $(INIT)
	caffeinate -s time emacs --batch --no-init-file --load .org-mode.emacs.el --find-file TC3F.org --funcall org-latex-export-to-pdf --kill
all: TC3F.txt TC3F.html TC3F.pdf
clean:
	rm $(INIT)
	rm TC3F.txt
	rm TC3F.html
	rm TC3F.pdf

Addendum: 14-06-13
Added caffeinate command.

Realtime web development with skewer and Emacs

[skewer-mode] provides live interaction with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML in a web browser. Expressions are sent on-the-fly from an editing buffer to be evaluated in the browser, just like Emacs does with an inferior Lisp process in Lisp modes.

Looks like a pretty nice option if you are used to Emacs already and so much more pleasant then running code in the Chrome/Firefox/IE REPL.

Easily setting system header arguments in org mode

A little helper function:

(defun gcr/set-org-system-header-arg (property value)
  "Easily set system header arguments in org mode.
PROPERTY is the system-wide value that you would like to modify.
VALUE is the new value you wish to store.
Attribution: URL http://orgmode.org/manual/System_002dwide-header-arguments.html#System_002dwide-header-arguments
"
  (setq org-babel-default-header-args
        (cons (cons property value)
              (assq-delete-all property org-babel-default-header-args))))