guile-aspell 0.3 released

I am pleased to announce an update of guile-aspell, which is a library for comparing a string against a dictionary and suggesting spelling corrections. It is in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language.  It is based on the aspell library.

The webpage for the library is at http://lonelycactus.com/guile-aspell.html

The development tree is at https://github.com/spk121/guile-aspell/

The latest source archive is at http://lonelycactus.com/tarball/guile_aspell-0.3.tar.gz

The NEWS for this release is
- move to FFI bindings
- drop Guile 1.8 support

There is no mailing list per se, but, you can contact the project either via https://github.com/spk121/guile-aspell/issues or by e-mailing me directly at spk121@yahoo.com

Thanks,
Mike Gran

guile-curl v0.4 released

I am pleased to announce an small update of guile-curl, which is a library for fetching files by URL from the internet in the GNU Guile dialect of the Scheme programming language.  It supports many protocols, such as https, ftp, tftp, and, most importantly, gopher.

The webpage for the library is at http://lonelycactus.com/guile-curl.html

The development tree is at https://github.com/spk121/guile-curl/

The latest source archive is at http://lonelycactus.com/tarball/guilecurl-0.4.tar.gz

The NEWS for this release is
- support for READDATA callbacks
- bug fixes, especially with respect to garbage collection on newer versions of Guile.

There is no mailing list per se, but, you can contact the project either via https://github.com/spk121/guile-curl/issues or by e-mailing me directly at spk121@yahoo.com

Thanks,
Mike Gran

The Bug Report

So I get a bug report. It is on GNU/Linux, of course, because that is the only ecosystem that sends bug reports.

So first I boot up my work box (Computer #1, Windows 10) which is the one that has the sweet monitor and try to VPN to the Server box (Computer #2, GNU/Linux Fedora Server, amd64).  But, of course, at one point I'd stripped all the non-console-mode functionality off of the server, so VPN is a fail.  I could have done the fix easily via ssh and emacs-nox, but, I figure it will only take a minute to get a graphical environment up and running.

There's a GNU Linux VM running on VirtualBox on the work box, but, I get distracted from the actual problem when I can't figure out how to get VirtualBox to create a large screen.  Totally not a problem, but, I get obsessed with this minutiae and can't let it go. I waste time tweaking the virtual graphics card settings with no effect.

So then I boot up the old linux box (Computer #3, GNU/Linux Fedora Workstation). It is 64 bit, but, it is running the i686 distro for reasons lost to history.  And then I remember that when I upgraded my wireless router, it stopped connecting via USB-connected Wifi. There are wpa_supplicant errors. Don't know why.  Spent a couple of hours trying to make it work.

Thus, I drag the old linux box to the room with the router so I can plug it in directly.  The only table is covered in padlocks, bottles of sunscreen, beads, jars of coins, and multiple Rubik's Cubes.  I clear a space.

The power cable to the spare monitor has gone missing.  It is a tiny HP w17e, but, still higher resolution than what I was getting from VirtualBox.   I search for 20 minutes. Eventually steal the power cable from work box.  My mostly ruined back complains when I shimmy under the desk to untangle it from the cable octopus.

I boot up old linux box.  Huh, it is only 100BaseT.  I dutifully do a "dnf upgrade". 1404 packages to update.  That takes another half hour.

And thus, I've used up the four hours of Saturday morning time which is the only time I have to devote to personal hacking.  Sorry bug reporter.  I'm too stupid to work on your request, and the computer gods hate me.  Better luck next week.