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A simple package for running many linters

3 March 2024 13:00

I used to configure Emacs to run a linter when saving some specific type of files. For example I'd have a perl-utilities package to reformat perl code, and run the perl-linter on saving, then I'd have a hook to do the same thing for Dockerfiles, etc, etc.

It occurred to me recently that I should have a linter for both JSON and YAML files, since I have to edit those filetypes so damn often, and that there wasn't a great solution for those - Until it occurred to me I wrote sysbox which is a simple collection of tools in one binary, and that supports some validation commands:

sysbox validate-json /path/to/file
sysbox validate-yaml /path/to/file
sysbox validate-xml  /path/to/file

With that in mind it became obvious that what I want to do is pretty much always the same:

  • Run an external command, when the file is saved.
    • If the exit-code of that command is "success" (i.e. zero):
      • Do nothing.
    • If the exit-code is "failure" (i.e. non-zero):
      • Show the output.

And this process is the same for ANY of the linters I run. The only thing that changes is the command to run, based on the mode/type of file in question.

That lead to the following configuration:

(defvar save-check-config
      '(

        (:mode cperl-mode
         :exec "perl -wc -I. %f"
         :cond (executable-find "perl"))

        (:mode dockerfile-mode
         :exec "hadolint --no-color %f"
         :cond (executable-find "hadolint"))

        (:mode json-mode
         :exec "sysbox validate-json %f"
         :cond (executable-find "sysbox"))

        (:mode nxml-mode
         :exec "sysbox validate-xml %f"
         :cond (executable-find "sysbox"))

        (:mode perl-mode
         :exec "perl -wc -I. %s"
         :cond (executable-find "perl"))

        ;; This avoids creating .pyc files, which would happen if we had
        ;; used the more natural/obvious "python3 -m py_compile %s" approach
        (:mode python-mode
         :exec "python3 -c 'import ast; ast.parse(open(\"%f\").read())'"
         :cond (executable-find "python3"))

        (:mode sh-mode
         :exec "shellcheck %f"
         :cond (executable-find "shellcheck"))

        (:mode terraform-mode
         :exec "tflint --no-color --chdir %d"
         :cond (executable-find "tflint"))

        (:mode yaml-mode
         :exec "sysbox validate-yaml %f"
         :cond (executable-find "sysbox"))
        )
     )

Basically a list of things:

  • We have the mode of files to which the linter/validator applies.
  • We have the command to run
    • %f is changed to the filename which has just been saved.
    • %d is changed to the directory-name containing that file.
  • We add a :cond key to decide if we should run.
    • Which basically is used for "if the binary is found .. run it, otherwise silently do nothing".

I'm quite pleased with how simple the package was to write, and now I have all my linting configuration in one-place.

I'd be tempted to do the same for "format on save", but to be honest with LSP most of the code I care about has that in-place already.

Should I rename to "multi-lint[er].el"? Probably, but I guess we'll see in the future.

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Falsehoods I used to believe about shoes

10 February 2024 13:00

Once upon a time I used to divide shoes, boots, and other footwear, into two categories:

  • Things that had good soles and a good grip.
  • Things that were slippery and treacherous.

Nowadays I know better. When walking on snow, ice, or slush it isn't the sole of the shoe that causes you to slip, slide, and fall. It is you.

The shoes do make a difference, which is why people use icebugs (i.e. shows with little nails sticking out) and similar things. But really it's all about walking "properly":

  • One leg directly below you.
  • Put your feet down flat.
  • Shorter strides.
  • Horizontal movement is dangerous.

TLDR; be like a penguin.

Also - I seem to no longer appear on "Planet Debian". Weird. A problem for another day.

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Please to meet you, hope you guessed my name?

9 October 2023 09:00

"Hello, my name is Steve" - those are words I've said a million times in my life, however they are not true words.

If you want to get all technical about things, my name has always been SteveN.

Mostly this hasn't mattered to me, or anybody else, I introduce myself as Steve, people call me Steve, and Steve is the name that makes me turn my head, when shouted across a bar. However things changed when I moved to Finland.

In Finland I had to open new bank accounts, sign mortgages, hand over IDs, and there were many many pieces of paper I signed, or forms I filled out. Unfortunately I screwed up:

  • If I were thinking clearly I'd think "Oh, this is something official, I'd best write SteveN".
  • If I were distracted, or not being careful I'd write my name as "Steve", and then sign it as Steve.

The end result? I've been in Finland for approximately eight years, and I have some official documentation calling me Steve, and some other official documentation calling myself Steven. (For example my "Permanent Residency Permit" calls me Steve, but my Social Security ID knows me as Steven.)

Every now and again somebody queries the mismatch, and there are daily moments of pain where I have to interact with different agencies, so I made the obvious decision: I'm gonna change my name.

A fee of €60 and a simple online form was sufficient to initiate the process. The processing time was given as "one to five months" on the official forename changing page, but happily the process was complete in a month.

I will now need to do a little housekeeping by getting updated bank-cards, etc, and then complete the process by changing my UK passport to match. Hopefully this won't take too long - but I guess if Finland knows me as Steve and the UK knows me as Steven I'll still be in a bit of a screwed up state, albeit one that is consistent in each country!

Not a big change really, but also it feels weird to suddenly say "Hello, my name is Steve" and mean it.

People are weird.

Names are interesting.

The end.

Fin.

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Old-School CGI Scripts!

24 September 2023 19:00

I'm not sure if I've talked about my job here, but I recently celebrated my one year anniversary - whilst on a company offsite trip to Sweden. When I joined the company there were approximately 100 people employed by it. Nowadays the numbers are much higher.

Having more people around is pretty awesome, but I realized that there were a lot of people wandering around the office who I didn't recognize so it occurred to me to make a game of it.

I had the idea I could write a slack bot to quiz me on my colleagues:

  • Show a random face, using the Slack profile picture.
  • Give a list of 5 names.
  • Ask me which was correct.

I spent an hour messing around with various Slack APIs, and decided the whole thing was too much of a hassle. Instead I wrote a simple script to download the details of all members of the workspace:

  • Name.
  • Email address.
  • Profile picture URL.

Then using that data, users.json, I hacked up a simple web application in Python, using the flask API. There only needed to be two pages:

  • A page ("/") to show five random images, each with five random names beneath them.
  • A page ("/quiz") to receive the HTTP POST, and score.

All in all this took only two hours or so. Old-school CGI is pretty awesome like that - Hidden values meant the whole thing could be stateless:

 <input type="hidden" name="1answer" value="Bob Smith" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="1profile" value="Sales" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="1url" value="https://.." ..

 <input type="hidden" name="2answer" value="Sally Smith" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="2profile" value="Sales" ..
 <input type="hidden" name="2url" value="https://.." ..

The only downside is that I don't have any authentication, so there is no ability to have a leaderboard. I've looked at the Okta samples and I think it would be easy to add, but I guess that would make it more complex and less portable. That said I'm not sharing the code this time, so who cares if it is tied to the company?

Anyway sometimes I forget how fast and easy it is to spinup a random virtual machine and present a HTTP(S) service for interactive use. This is one of those times when I remembered.

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Simple REPL for CP/M, in Z80 assembly

24 June 2023 13:00

So my previous post documented a couple of simple "scripting languages" for small computers, allowing basic operations in a compact/terse fashion.

I mentioned that I might be tempted to write something similar for CP/M, in Z80 assembly, and the result is here:

To sum up it allows running programs like this:

0m 16k{rP _ _}
C3 03 EA 00 00 C3 06 DC 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Numbers automatically get saved to the A-register, the accumulator. In addition to that there are three dedicated registers:

  • M-register is used to specify which RAM address to read/write from.
    • The instruction m copies the value of accumulator to the M-register.
    • The instruction M copies the value of the M-register to the accumulator.
  • K-register is used to execute loops.
    • The instruction k copies the value of accumulator to the K-register.
    • The instruction K copies the value of the K-register to the accumulator.
  • U-register is used to specify which port to run I/O input and output from.
    • The instruction u copies the value of accumulator to the U-register.
    • The instruction U copies the value of the U-register to the accumulator.

So the program above:

  • 0m
    • 0 is stored in the accumulator.
    • m copies the value of the accumulator to the M-register.
  • 16k
    • 16 is stored in the accumulator.
    • k copies the value of the accumulator (16) to the K-register, which is used for looping.
  • { - Starts a loop.
    • The K-register is decremented by one.
    • If the K-register is greater than zero the body is executed, up to the closing brace.
  • Loop body:
    • r Read a byte to the accumulator from the address stored in the M-register, incrementing that register in the process.
    • P: Print the contents of the accumulator.
    • _ _ Print a space.
  • } End of the loop, and end of the program.

TLDR: Dump the first sixteen bytes of RAM, at address 0x0000, to the console.

Though this program allows delays, RAM read/write, I/O port input and output, as well as loops it's both kinda fun, and kinda pointless. I guess you could spend hours flashing lights and having other similar fun. But only if you're like me!

All told the code compiles down to about 800 bytes and uses less than ten bytes of RAM to store register-state. It could be smaller with some effort, but it was written a bit adhoc and I think I'm probably done now.

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Simple toy languages

22 June 2023 13:00

Recently I was looking around the internet and looking for something to do with some ESP8266 devices, which I've been neglecting over recent years.

When I was on paternity-leave, five years ago, I decided I wanted a new hobby for my "down" time. I had two obvious choices a) developing applications for mobiles, or b) working with "hardware". I chose the latter.

By accident I came across a couple of simple scripting languages, FORTH-esque. Sample usage looks something like this (which obviously sends the command over a serial-device to the connected-board):

$ echo '5{ 6d 1o 100m 0o 100m }' >/dev/cu.usbmodem12341

That's a little terse, but briefly:

  • 5{ ... }
    • Execute the block five times.
  • 6d
    • Set the output pin, in the example "D6".
  • 1o
    • Output "1" to the pin we've selected, D6 in this example.
  • 100m
    • Delay for 100 milliseconds.
  • 0o
    • Output "0" to the pin we've selected, D6 in this example.

The end result is a blinking LED, for five iterations anyway. The code for this interpreter is described in the following link, with the code in the linked gist:

This is derived from an older, and simpler, project which has a similar focus but slightly different built-in operations (and which lacks loops/conditionals):

Both of these implementations are very similar, I guess due to the shared history and obvious FORTH-inspiration. Each allows port I/O, delays, and simple math opertions. We can pretend they're stack-based, though there are some differences and some niggles.

I'm kinda tempted to port one of them to Z80 assembly, and see if I can get it running under CP/M. I guess I could add a REPL for interactive use, though without actual hardware connected to my single-board computer it might all feel a little pointless. Then again I have Turbo Pascal, and even a tiny C-compiler, so I guess with those in mind any toy-language is pointless in a completely different regard.

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Managing header-spacing in markdown/org-mode files

21 April 2023 10:00

It seems I'm having a theme recently on this blog, of making emacs-related posts. Here's another.

I write a bunch of stuff in markdown, such as my emacs init-file, blog-posts and other documents. I try to be quite consistent about vertical spacing, for example a post might look like this:

# header1

Some top-level stuff.

## header2

Some more details.

## header2

Some more things on a related topic.



# header2

Here I'm trying to breakup sections, so there is a "big gap" between H1 and smaller gaps between the lesser-level headings.

After going over my init file recently, making some changes, I noticed that the spacing was not at all consistent. So I figured "How hard could it be to recognize headers and insert/remove newlines before them?"

A trivial regexp search for "^#" identifies headers, and that counting the "#" characters lets you determine their depth. From their removing any previous newlines is the work of a moment, and inserting the appropriate number to ensure consistency is simple.

I spent 15 minutes writing the initial implementation, which was markdown-specific, then another 30 minutes adding support for org-mode files - because my work-diary is written using the org-diary package (along with other helpers, such as the org-tag-cloud.

Anyway the end result is that now when I save a markdown/org file the headers are updated automatically:

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A quick hack for Emacs

24 February 2023 10:00

As I've mentioned in the past I keep a work-log, or work-diary, recording my activities every day.

I have a bunch of standard things that I record, but one thing that often ends up happening is that I make references to external bug trackers, be they Jira, Bugzilla, or something else.

Today I hacked up a simple emacs minor-mode for converting these references to hyperlinks, automatically, via the use of regular expressions.

Given this configuration:

(setq linkifier-patterns '(
          ("\\\<XXX-[0-9]+\\\>" "https://jira.example.com/browse/%s")
          ("\\\<BUG-[0-9]+\\\>" "https://bugzilla.example.com/show?id=%s")))

When the minor-mode is active the any literal text that matches the pattern, for example "XXX-1234", will suddenly become a clickable button that will open Jira, and BUG-1234 will become a clickable button that opens the appropriate bug in Bugzilla.

There's no rewriting of the content, this is just a bit of magic that changes the display of the text (i.e. I'm using a button/text-property).

Since I mostly write in org-mode I could have written my text like so:

[[jira:XXX-1234][XXX-1234]]

But that feels like an ugly thing to do, and that style of links wouldn't work outside org-files anyway. That said it's a useful approach if you're only using org-mode, and the setup is simple:

(add-to-list 'org-link-abbrev-alist
    '("jira" . "http://jira.example.com/browse/%s"))

Anyway, cute hack. Useful too.

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A summary of the year.

28 December 2022 10:00

This year had a lot of things happen in it, world-wide, as is always the case.

Being more selfish here are the things I remember, in brief unless there are comments/questions:

  • I learned more Finnish.
  • Lots of things with our child.
    • I helped teach him to swim.
    • He learned to tell the time with an analog clock/watch.
    • I took him to a circus for the first (only) time ever.
    • He cut his hair for the first time in six years.
    • He spent his a birthday with my parents, in the UK - His languages skills were on top-form, understanding the various UK accents.
    • And another with family here in Finland - Where he watched me roll, naked, in the snow after sauna, and then he asked "Daddy why you did that?"

On the topic of Finnish I'm getting pretty damn good at understanding, albeit less good in speaking. Finnish is all about the suffixes, so:

  • A car
    • auto
  • My car
    • autoni
  • In a car
    • autossa
  • In my car
    • autossani
  • With my car
    • autolläni
  • From a car
    • autosta
  • Car-less
    • autoton

Most of this is regular, so you can be childless via the "ton" suffix - lapsiton is "lapsi" (child) "ton" (less). The hard part in communication is thus twofold:

  • Knowing the word you want to use, be it car, cake, spoon, or smile.
  • Getting the appropriate suffix for the use you want.

Our child turned six recently, and most of the year was spent doing things with him, for him, and to him. He's on the verge of learning to read (English and Finnish), he's interested in maths and completes little puzzles freely and happily. He likes to help with Sodoku, for example and not just the child-versions.

In the past couple of weeks I let him play Super Mario & Super Mario Bros 3, on a NES Classic, and he dies constantly, with a smile on his face. But he does love to tell me what to do when he watches me play!

He's learned to ice-skate, and ski, and almost learned to swim. (I'll say he can swim 3m inside a pool, without aid, but then he starts to sink.) We've got a couple of regular rituals with each other - including going to sauna every week or two, and other similar things.

He's gotten more interested in helping me cook, and his mother too. (My wife and I live in separate houses..)

I guess the next big milestone will be him walking to school by himself, which will start next year. As things stand I wake up early, go over to his house, and do all the morning-things, before I take him there. I expect I'll still want to go there, give him his breakfast, his medicine, and help him get dressed. After that I guess I kick him out, and he makes his own way there.

Happily the walk to school is a few hundred meters, and doesn't involve crossing any roads. But of course it does bring other complications: if he's not collected, and walks home himself, then he needs a key to one/other house, and there's the potential need for a phone to say "I'm late", "I'm lost", or us to say "Where are you?".

Anyway .. interesting year .. good year. Despite everything else.

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I put an LSP in your LISP ..

28 November 2022 22:00

I recently wrote about yet another lisp I'd been having fun with.

Over the past couple of years I've played with a few toy scripting languages, or random interpreters, and this time I figured I'd do something beyond the minimum, by implementing the Language Server Protocol.

In brief the language server protocol (LSP) is designed to abstract functionality that might be provided by an editor, or IDE, into a small "language server". If the language-server knows how to jump to definitions, provide completion, etc, etc, then the editor doesn't need to implement those things for NN different languages - it just needs to launch and communicate with something that does know how to do the job.

Anyway LSP? LISP? Only one letter different, so that's practically enough reason to have a stab at it.

Thankfully I found a beautiful library that implements a simple framework allowing the easy implementation of a golang-based LSP-serverÖ

Using that I quickly hacked up a server that can provide:

  • Overview of all standard-library functions, on hover.
  • Completion of all standard-library functions.

I've tested this in both GNU Emacs and Neovim, so that means I'm happy I support all editors! (More seriously if it works in two then that probably means that the LSP stuff should work elsewhere too.)

Here's what the "help on hover" looks like, within Emacs:

Vim looks similar but you have to press K to see the wee popup. Still kinda cute, and was a good experiment.

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