Getting gnus to send email

Problem when sending mail from cvs gnus/emacs in a fresh ubuntu 8.04 installation:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Sending failed; SMTP protocol error")
  signal(error ("Sending failed; SMTP protocol error"))
  error("Sending failed; SMTP protocol error")
  smtpmail-send-it()
  message-send-mail(nil)
  message-send-via-mail(nil)
  message-send(nil)
  message-send-and-exit(nil)
  call-interactively(message-send-and-exit nil nil)

Solution:

sudo apt-get install starttls

Special for emacs groupies!

Wow - TV Raman, Bubbles and Carsten Dominik together on stage at Google, where Carsten gave a Google Tech Talk about org-mode.

Emacs is fun!

Here's a bit from Sacha Chua on the joy of writing in emacs lisp.

Using etags with Mathematica code

For years I've avoided using emacs' tags table functions, but I finally had to break down and read about them tonight to search eficiently through a huge collection of Mathematica packages and applications.

After reading the fine manual it was easy to create a tags table of Mathematica function definitions and variable assignments:

cd topdir;
find . -name "*.m" -print | grep -v BrowserCategories.m | \
etags \
  --language=none \
  --regex='/\([A-Za-z0-9$]+\)[ \t]*=/\1/' \
  --regex='/\([A-Za-z0-9$]+\).*:=/\1/' -

The second regexp choked on a particular BrowserCategories.m; since they don't contain the definitions I'm looking for I removed them from consideration.

The two regexs find these sorts of things:

fact[1] = 1;
fact[n_] := n fact[n - 1]

Video editing in emacs

Looks very cool - announcement here, homepage here. Thanks, Mike!

UPDATE: from Arnold Matyasi's comment, there's a blog with some demonstrations and handy links:

• the project's Savannah task page
• homepage at http://1010.co.uk/gneve.html
• online devel branch at Google Code

The video used in the demonstration was taken at Tihany, Hungary, hometown of St Martin of Tours and, since 996, home of the Benedictine Pannonhalma Archabbey, whose charter is the oldest surviving document in the Hungarian language.

Testing a new version of an old blog

A few years ago I started a blog devoted to writings about the mysteries of the Rosary, but like many of my ever-welling monomanias it didn't last all that long. Here's a new version, done in emacs and pyblosxom like this one. Pardon the dust in the corners.

Blogging with emacs

One great advantage to blogging in emacs' muse mode is that each entry is a separate text file that I can munge using the full power of emacs. I just changed the "ubuntu" references in all these entries to "ubuntu 7.04" where needed via dired-do-query-replace-regexp (er, 'Q' in a dired buffer). Try that in movabletype without getting down & dirty with mysql.

How to compile cvs emacs in a fresh ubuntu 7.04 installation

Once you've installed ubuntu 7.04 the very next thing you need to do is compile cvs emacs, right? Of course. Here's how.

First, to compile programs you need various development libraries (and you may want to grab some optional goodies):

sudo apt-get install build-essential libc6-dev libgtk2.0-0
libgtk2.0-bin libgtk2.0-common libgtk2.0-dev libjpeg62-dev libjpeg62
libncurses5-dev libpng12-dev libpng12-0 libsm-dev libtiff4-dev
libtiff4 libx11-dev libxext-dev libxmu-dev libxmu-headers libxpm-dev
libxt-dev xlibs-dev libungif4-dev flashplugin-nonfree gnomesword
sword-language-pack-en sword-text-web

get cvs so you can checkout emacs

mkdir ~/software
cd ~/software
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/source/stable/1.11.22/cvs-1.11.22.tar.gz
tar xvf cvs-1.11.22.tar.gz
cd cvs-1.11.22/
./configure
make
sudo make install

get texinfo so you'll have documentation in emacs

cd ~/software
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-4.11.tar.gz
tar xvf texinfo-4.11.tar.gz
cd texinfo-4.11/
./configure
make
sudo make install

checkout the latest emacs and compile (I hate the gui scrollbars)

cd ~/software
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs
cd emacs
./configure --without-toolkit-scroll-bars
make bootstrap

I run emacs from its src dir by putting this in my ~/.bashrc:

PATH=/home/billw/software/emacs/src:$PATH

Note that you should check gnu.org for the latest versions of cvs and texinfo. The entire process from inserting the ubuntu install cd in a bare wiped machine to launching a freshly-compiled emacs took 45 minutes this evening.