[Wed Jun 25 16:46:42 CDT 2014]

Anybody who runs the mutt email client (yes, a dying bread, since pretty much everybody prefers to run flashy GUI clients) will know that, when spawning an external viewer application to view a particular file, mutt pauses until the external app is closed. Yes, sor of annoying, isn't it? Especially for those of us who may launch the application to take a quick look at the file, and then decide to continue reading email before returning to the file and commenting on it.

So, first of all, why does it happen at all? Well, it may surprise you, but the reason is that mutt is a single-threaded application. So, it just hangs when launching the external application and then, when the app is closed, it cleans things up and returns to execute. But now, for the second (and most interesting) bit: is it possible to configure mutt to launch the external application in the background? As it turns out, it is. This page has the details. I just gave it a try, and it worked fine. The key is to download a copy of the mutt_bgrun script and configure your ~/.mailcap to use it. Like I said, it works like a charm. Nice. {link to this entry}

[Thu Jun 19 16:52:08 CDT 2014]

Phoronix publishes a cool piece on a Wayland-based compositor with support for 3D windows that was developed as a part of a master thesis. Here is the video:

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[Wed Jun 18 16:14:01 CDT 2014]

Since I still use a text-based email client (mutt), I rely on the mailcap file to configure the applications that need to be launched to view certain files. And, for whatever reason, the default mailcap configuration I had on my system did not incude any entry for the latest Microsoft Office formats. So, in case you are wondering, you just have to add the MIME types listed on this page. These are the lines I added to my file:

application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; libreoffice '%s';
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation; libreoffice '%s';
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; libreoffice '%s';

{link to this entry}

[Wed Jun 4 15:13:27 CDT 2014]

Wired publishes a piece by Cade Metz titled Why Coders Are Going Nuts Over Apple's New Programming Language that is worth reading, I think. The new language is called Swift, and it's based on Objective-C, the langguage they have been using since the 1980s. I must say that, while some of the features of the new language (in particular the concept of an "Interactive Playground" that shows the results of a piece of code as you type it) are indeed quite exciting, others (garbage collection, inferred typing...) have just been part of the mainstream languages for years and years. Yet, once again, Apple's marketing juggernaut is redefining the playing field. Yes, it sounds sort of interesting. Yes, Apple is a clear contender to take into account if you want to program for mobile devices. But yes, as Metz argues, perhaps they could have built something on top of some existing language, such as Python or Ruby, instead of reinventing the wheel one more time. We all know why they did it, of course. Apple is just being Apple. They want you to use products that they fully control and, more to the point, that you can only use to develop for their own hardware. After all, switching to something like Python or Ruby means that one could easily port the applications to a competitor's platform. That's a no-no on Apple's book, obviously. {link to this entry}