A core part of my note-taking strategy is a growing collection of Emacs Org mode files containing my monthly lab journals, project summaries and various technical documents. Usually I rely on Projectile’s Helm integration to perform recursive searches with The Silver Searcher (ag) using helm-projectile-ag (trigged by the completely muscle-memorised C-c p s s) through all of the org files in my notes hierarchy. Recursive regular expression search results are shown interactively as you type.

If you want C++ completion and navigation (jump to definition, jump to declaration, and so forth), there are several good options for Emacs. For a QtQuick / C++ project I’m working on, I needed the best Emacs has to offer. This turned out to be the Clang-based rtags system. Rtags is not the easiest of the options to get going, hence this short tutorial. I initially configured irony-mode, which is also Clang-based and was significantly easier to get going, but it soon started hanging on the completion of for example QStringList methods in my project.

When developing a mobile app using Cordova or PhoneGap, the browser target platform can really speed up your development. You could serve the HTML files directly using cordova serve, but the browser platform, while being almost as fast, is much closer to the Android / IOS environments your app will eventually find itself in. It also has access to the Cordova APIs. My general workflow is that I keep cordova run browser running in a terminal window (this will initially start a new instance of chrome), and periodically run cordova prepare browser as I’m developing.

ECL is of course Embeddable Common Lisp, a small but quite complete Common Lisp implementation that can be easily embedded in your C applications to act as dynamic extension language, but it is also a fine stand-alone implementation. It includes an interpreter and a compiler, and can even produce compact binaries. Read this blog post by Chris Kohlhepp for a brief and practical overview. SLIME is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, a great Emacs environment within which one can write code for a number of Common Lisp implementations.

Usually when I’m working on a Django project, I use the built-in runserver command. For deployment, we mostly use nginx and uwsgi in front of Django. However, for a new side project I needed a local Django setup with a faster debug server. To keep things simple, I was looking for a pure Python solution that could serve static files, and did automatic reloading on source change, just like runserver.

Just in case you were wondering how one could go about having any child widget of a Kivy Scatter widget that would stick in a single window-relative position whilst the scatter itself was being translated and rotated, I thought I’d post this solution. With a scatter, one can very easily implement a canvas-like object that can be rotated, translated and zoomed, whilst all of the widgets it contains are transformed along with it.

Ever since I dropped Dropbox in September of 2013 due to mounting privacy concerns, I’ve been searching for and testing various filesystem syncing solutions to take its place. This post is a summary of the notes I made during this time. It’s quite hard finding reviews online that go deeper than the very surface. Most sync software reviews can be summarised as: Hey, look, here’s a new service that’s a dropbox killer / dropbox alternatives / disruptive in the sync space.