Earlier I blogged about Epresent, which is basically a piece of code for making Org-Mode suitable for preparing presentation slides. There are times when I can’t resist mentioning the innovative Racket programming language in a presentation. In those situations I tend to want to have syntax-highlighted Scheme code on my slides, and also to evaluate the code snippets and insert the results next to the code listing. This is apparently the sort of thing one can do with Org-Mode Babel, for a variety of languages.

Text rendering in Emacs has been looking mighty good since 23.1, and this opens up possibilities to do even more in Emacs. For example, I recently came across something called epresent.el on GitHub, by Eric Schulte et al. The epresent.el Emacs Lisp file leverages Org-Mode to implement a simple presentation mode for Emacs. Using Org-Mode is, at least for me, faster than struggling with something like OpenOffice.org Impress.

Some days ago I released a little code generation utility that I have been using for well over a year in cranking out repetitive C++ code. Koog is—for lack of a better established term—a mixed-code generator. It is similar to other tools of its kind (such as Cog), but the only one that I know of that uses the Scheme language for specifying what code to generate.

So I upgrade the firmware of my Nokia E71 from v200 something to v300 something.

S60 3rd Edition has been out for quite a while by now, and for me, the one thing that has all but killed the pleasure of developing native software for the platform has been the humiliating wait—dismiss dialog—wait—dismiss dialog—wait—dismiss dialog—wait procedure during installation of the software being tested and developed. For one-off installations the installation procedure is no problem, but when you’re a developer it gets old real fast.

Earlier releases of the Miso PyS60 extension had a take_photo function, for taking photos (without a viewfinder). This functionality (and more) has since then been integrated to PyS60 itself in the form of the built-in camera module.

Early last year at HIIT I hacked the Python for S60 inbox module to have it support querying for the content and metadata of messages in the device Inbox that have been sent via Bluetooth OBEX Push. (The built-in inbox module apparently only supports accessing SMS messages.) I changed the name of the hacked module to pyinbox, to avoid conflicts with the built-in Inbox access module.

In the PDIS project at HIIT we developed a socket library for Python for S60. The library consisted of both a native extension and quite a bit of Python code. The native extension was called aosocketnativenew, and became somewhat well known as an extension supporting non-interactive Bluetooth discovery.