Category: Software

fink’s TeX packages

Fink’s support for TeX packages is poor: there aren’t many in the distribution and it’s not clear how best to add more. I ran into this while creating a fink package for TIPA, which I needed for a linguistics assignment.

They’re still using teTeX 3.0, while the rest of the world has moved on to TeXlive: in fact, tipa is part of TeXlive so if they’d made the move I wouldn’t even have to create a package.

Unlike debian, which has a TeX packaging policy, fink packaging of TeX seems quite ad-hoc. It’s hard to see where the correct place to install to is: README.fink only mentions ~/Library/texmf for users.

The only example of an “extra” package I could find was latex-beamer. That package installs itself to /sw/share/texmf-local. Some people seem to think this directory (or more correctly, /sw/etc/texmf.local which is the symlinked) is reserved for user-managed TeX packages. If official fink packages are installing themselves here, then that’s not the case.

Anyway, here’s the resulting finkinfo.

Apple Mail filters suck

While I would normally use gnus/gmane for mailing lists, cygwin-apps‘s gmane gateway is read-only, so sending a message necessitates an ezmlm subscription. Unlike mailman, ezmlm doesn’t allow you to be subscribed in a “don’t send me mail” state.

So I end up with 38 emails of noise in my inbox overnight, which would be fine, except that interspersed with these are personal emails which I overlook.

One of the nifty features of M2 was its automatic mailboxes for mailing lists. IIRC thunderbird had similar “virtual folders”, and Apple Mail has a “Smart Mailbox” feature that is essentially stored filters. The only problem is, the Apple smartness is limited to a few predefined fields, and the “Mailing-List” and “List-Id” headers aren’t among them. However, you *can* add custom headers for “Rules”, but this requires a genuine folder (e.g. an IMAP folder), and by that point it’s a better policy to add the rule server-side.

So, here’s the maildrop ~/.mailfilter rule:

if (/^List-Id:.*/)
{
        exception {
                to $DEFAULT/.Lists/
        }
}

Cocoa devs fail Data Structures & Algorithms?

I can’t find a linked-list class in Cocoa. Yes, I do want to do middle-insertions, and I’d have a fine time amortising my sequential access to constant time. Fine; it’s not like they’re hard to implement.

The scary thing is that when searching, I blindly fell into the pool of ignorance displayed in this circa-2004 Cocoa-dev thread. To be fair, the OP was more concerned about iterator functionality than a list implementation, but most of the responses seemed oblivious to:

  • The iterator design pattern
  • The time-complexity advantages of a linked-list implementation over arrays and deques (NSArray) and hashes and trees (NSDictionary and NSSet)

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