Tom Roche

Ever Improving my Personal Note Taking Process

This past week, I’ve been migrating my blogging workflow towards an Org-Mode-first workflow. By that I mean I’m writing my blog posts using Org-mode 📖 and exporting the content to Hugo for building Take on Rules.

Why This Added Layer of Effort?

The short answer to “why this added layer of effort” is because of Org-Roam and Org-Transclusion. But those are technical implementations. First I want to talk about the functional issues I’ve encountered.

I write a lot of notes. For work, I keep a daily list of tasks I’ve worked on. I also write meeting notes

And I write notes to think through a technical approach. For all of that, I use Org-mode. For commit messages and interactions with GitHub, I use Markdown.

For play, I write session reports, poetry, thoughts about games, reviews, and so on. Up until recently, I’ve written most of that with Markdown.

In other words, I had two different formats for my non-programming writing. That alone isn’t a reason to change; and is one reason I previously had not.

Yet this bifurcation sat as a mental irritant, even though it was not quite a problem to solve. A year ago someone told me that at some point I’d be migrating to Org-Mode for blogging. So credit to them for seeing that future. I chose to sit with this mental friction, to better understand the problem I was experiencing.

What Changed?

A slow moving confluence of moments brought about this change.

When I was facilitating the New Vistas in the Thel Sector campaign, I wrote notes using Org-Mode and Org-Roam and exported my notes to Markdown. At the time, I would then finesse the export. This involved scrubbing links to “private” notes. My Game Master (GM 📖) notes if you will. I was also new to Emacs and not yet comfortable with emacs-lisp.

As that campaign spun down, I started writing functions to help me compose Markdown blog posts. These functions lean heavily on yasnippet and later custom emacs-lisp. In all of this, I wasn’t ready to address the mixture of “public” and “private” notes paired with the idea of yet another content migration. I have migrated this blog’s page generation from Wordpress

Fast forward to , and I’m playing in two Burning Wheel Gold (BWG 📖) games. I’m facilitating the Mistimed Scroll campaign. I am about 5 session reports behind on this campaign . And I’m playing in Burning Locusts. In both campaigns, one of the fellow players is also an Emacs enthusiast.

When they shared their DOT notation graph representating the relationships in Graphviz, I followed with Using PlantUML to Model RPG Relationship Maps. They then wrote Burning Plants.

That exchange was another brain-worm that nudged me revisit my blogging process.

Why? Because Org-Roam’s Org-Roam UI can generate an interactive graph based on nodes. And more importantly, I had found and was playing games with a fellow gamer that was interested in Emacs, relationship graphs, note taking, and many other shared interestes. The kind of gamer who I’d love to meet for coffee and just talk about games and theory.

Sidebar for a Glossary

Before I go further, I want to briefly work through some graph terms.

Node

a chunk of descriptive information

Edge

a reference from one Node to another Node

In Org-Roam, when I create Node A and add a link to Node B, that creates an edge A -> B. In Org-Roam, Node A references Node B and Node B has a back link to Node A.

Org-Roam also exposes the concept of :ROAM_REFS:. Let’s say I add Node C to my notes. For Node C lets set its :ROAM_REFS: to include “https://orgmode.org”. Now, anytime I link to “https://orgmode.org” in my notes, Node C will have a back link to that reference.

In other words, :ROAM_REFS: let me create proxies for external concepts.

As I learned about that, I started exporting my blog’s posts to my Org-Mode directory. The original reason for export into Org-Mode was because I have also been writing more technical blog posts that I wanted to reference in my private note-taking; a confluence of labyrinthine moments.

But, I was treating my blog as the primary source of knowledge. And that runs contrary to the actual model. My thoughts are private, and in speaking them, they become public. But I digress a bit.

Back to taking Session Notes

With my blog now “imported” into my Org Mode ecosystem. Not migrated just imported via some Ruby scripts and Pandoc antics. Critical in this import is that I would generate a node ID and a :ROAM_REF: entry. Thus creating the connection between public URL and private node identity. I started thinking about the directional flow of information.

This is when I again revisited Ox-Hugo. I was looking to scratch the itch of resolving the directional flow of knowledge, and the Do I need to re-write my whole blog in Org? page gave me confidence to spend a bit of time exploring.

I started with a Literate Programming approach and wrote my takeonrules.org export functions. I also mentally framed this whole thing as an experiment; something I would test and observe and rollback if necessary.

The main concept being that I wanted to correct the flow of information (e.g., private to public). When exporting a node, I did not want to export links to private nodes. It is okay to export the text but I don’t want to export broken links.

And my experiment worked.

But Wait, There’s More

As I solve one problem, I become aware of more opportunities that arise with the new state. And I owe you, dear reader, information about Org-Transclusion.

Once I had the export working, I started looking at the graphical structure of my notes in Org-Roam UI. And as structured, each game session node (e.g. the node I publish to my blog) had lots of edges. After all, I was writing all of these notes in one node. My custom export process assumes that I’m exporting one file which has one Org-Roam node; an implementation detail that has thus far been adequate

Which node has the reference impacts the back links. To make it concrete; my session notes incorporate Non-Player Characters (NPCs 📖), and while back links from the NPC to their sessions is nice, I’m often more interested in the scenes in which they were present.

Around this time, I also got the wild idea of “How might I, a player in Burning Locusts share my notes with the game facilitator, such that they could overlay their notes on my notes. I spent a bit of time thinking through that in my Burning Locusts Campaign Data repository. You can also see a snapshot of the campaign data.

Which brings me to Org-Transclusion. I started reworking this in my to be published Burning Locusts: Session 7 notes. At the time of writing this I linked to my internal notes, but you dear reader, will not have such a link until I both re-export this post and publish the session notes.

What I’ve now chosen to do is to create a node for each scene. And transclude those nodes into my session report. In a way, my session report is an index of scenes. Here’s what that session report looks like:

:PROPERTIES:
:ID:       4E332C1F-57FA-47D3-B303-A4B21AF3BA3B
:SESSION_REPORT_DATE: 2022-02-16
:SESSION_REPORT_GAME: BURNING-WHEEL-GOLD
:SESSION_REPORT_LOCATION: via Discord and Roll20
:END:

#+title: Burning Locusts: Session 7
#+SUBTITLE: Arson, Ambush, and Art Sales
#+FILETAGS: :session-report:burning-locusts:rpg:burning-wheel:

* TODO More Happenings at Adriano’s Party

#+transclude: [[file:20220225---adriano-faraldo-s-party.org::*Session 7][Session 7]] :only-contents


* TODO Aftermath of the Ambush at Adriano’s

#+transclude: [[id:1226FDD8-E7D3-4AF1-9958-5DC0ABE721FF][Aftermath of the Ambush at Adriano’s]]


* DONE Background Events Resolved After Adriano’s Party

#+transclude: [[id:6AC158C5-2279-4A80-916F-E087F5B6FF2D][Background Events Resolved After Adriano’s Party]]


* DONE Frederico Meets with the City Clerk

#+transclude: [[id:8761371C-B4C2-4E06-8C13-135BB0780382][Frederico Meets with the City Clerk]]


* DONE Antonius and Maccio Have a Conversation Regarding the Arsonist

#+transclude: [[id:7DABFA0F-5200-46E0-A494-F9EBFD23CBAD][Antonius and Maccio Have a Conversation Regarding the Arsonist]]


* DONE Frederico and Antonius Seek a Fence

#+transclude:  [[id:0BEFCA44-8DA4-4167-A727-07F676F6EBD1][Frederico and Antonius Seek a Fence]]

* TODO Closing Scene

I have minimal memory of this, as it was very much a denouement.

For transclusions to “register” as back links, I removed (keyword "transclude") from the org-roam-db-extra-links-exclude-keys variable. I submitted an issue to org-transclusion describing the behavior without this adjustment

You’ll also note that I repeat the header with the label of the transclusion. I wouldn’t need to do this, if I moved the header into the file. But I prefer this method.

Conclusion

Riffing on Clarke, and as I’ve said before, “Any sufficiently advanced hobby is indistinguishable from work.”

I have a lot of tooling for helping me write Markdown blog posts, and nothing that I’ve done invalidates that. Instead I’ve extended my workflow to allow me to now better take and share session notes. If I’ve learned anything in my 2 years with Emacs 📖, all aspects of my computer life benefit when I experiment with writing and knowledge management.

For example, when I’m writing my daily work activity log and am working with someone on that activity, I add a reference to those coworkers. Yes, there’s a node for each person I interact with at work . This way, if I need to recall information, I have the back link available as a tool to assist on that recollection.

Postscript

As I finished writing this post, I realized that another catalyst in this change was adopting a Literate Programming approach. I spent time moving my Emacs configuration to use org-babel-tangle, which allows for a mixture of prose and code. Which is not to confuse the prose with code comments.

It turns out that taking the time to write through an observed problem with prose tools while also having access to coding context all in the same file helps me better think through these problems.

Felix is joined by musician Nate Ruess to discuss Nashville (2012) and figure out if it’s possible to make a good show about music or nah.

Check out Nate on the Clayne Cast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-607262935/clayne-cast-episode-1

Krystal and Saagar talk about NBC's disastrous Olympics ratings, a rat infestation of a major food chain, the record of judge Michelle Childs, and how the MBA is the root of all corporate evil with new contributor James Li!

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and Spotify

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl 

Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/

James Li: https://www.youtube.com/c/5149withJamesLi

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Click here for the full episode, including an extended interview with Branko Marcetic about Ukraine, Epstein & more, plus a chat about Vaush.

Note: This episode was recorded before Russia invaded Ukraine. The interview with Branko Marcetic provides a lot of useful context on how we got here.

When we look at the progression of this war, the Biden administration and cable news hosts will tell you that Mastermind Putin foresaw this six moves back in his chess game, and that the only thing we could’ve done was impose more sanctions earlier.

They won’t tell you about the US escalating tensions for years, stoking the 2014 coup and aiding neo-Nazi forces for its own benefit.

Now, two war-mongering countries, both with bloated militaries, whose people are neglected in favor of entrenched elites, whose politicians profit from war, are back to causing destruction.

And Ukraine is stuck in the middle.

Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic joins us to break down everything happening in the region and the steps that led to Russia’s deadly attack. See the extended episode for the full discussion on Ukraine plus a look at his in-depth reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

It’s a dark day, but Useful Idiots will always keep speaking the truth. Join us as we follow the news and keep the people of Ukraine in our thoughts.

It’s this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out now.

Subscribe now

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

February 17, 2022 Toronto-based activist and organizer John Clarke on the politics and personnel behind the Ottawa convoy • Dave Zirin on racism in the NFL (and Brian Flores’s lawsuit over it) • Justine Medina on working at Amazon and trying to unionize it

In another Superdelegate-selected episode, we discuss THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT (1996), the hagiographic biopic of the Hustler Magazine publisher and First Amendment warrior. We discuss Flynt's politics and the implications of his brand of civil libertarianism. PLUS: would you like to live in a town run by Disney?

"Announcing Storyliving by Disney": www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CVucnt46ww

Michael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

So, we recorded an in depth Ukraine update with Derek on Tuesday evening, and obviously now the update needs to be updated. So Derek leads us off with some context and what we know of the Russia/Ukraine situation as of the morning of Thursday, 2/24, then we go back and cover how we got up to here. Then finally, for even more context, we have a piece from noted Foreign Policy expert Terrell Jermaine Starr on how everything about Vladimir Putin can be made clear through a close reading of HBO’s The Wire.

Check out Derek’s FP newsletter Foreign Exchanges here: https://fx.substack.com/

And check out Derek and Danny’s FP podcast American Prestige here:

https://soundcloud.com/americanprestige

And subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/americanprestige

Krystal and Saagar provide detailed, in depth coverage of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and how the world has responded so far in terms of the political leadership, financial markets, domestic populations, and what this means for our geopolitical future.



To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and Spotify

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl 

Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Wilson over at the System Crafters Channel has a new video up on The 6 Emacs Settings Every User Should Consider. The six settings are

1. Enable remembering recently edited files
2. Enable minibuffer history
3. Enable remembering last place visited in file
4. Changing the location of the custom file
5. Disabling UI dialog boxes
6. Enabling automatic reversion of file changes

Even intermediate Emacs users are probably familiar with most of those settings although I had never heard about disabling dialog boxes before. That’s probably because they only come into play when you’re using the mouse, which I virtually never do.

Oddly, I use only two of these settings. I have my init.el under version control so it’s really annoying when some random function decides to scribble in it. That can be avoided by moving the custom data to a separate file. That file will also receive the random scribblings so my init.el doesn’t get corrupted with transient information.

The other setting I use is to enable minibuffer history. That’s really useful and something I take advantage of many times a day.

I haven’t explicitly enabled recentf but something else in my configuration has because recent files are being saved and when I tried recentf-open-files I got the list as shown in the video. Even so, my workflow is such that I’d hardly ever use the facility so I ignore the setting and will probably forget all about it soon.

The same goes for remembering the last place visited in files. I hate that kind of thing. Emacs has great search capabilities—which avy makes even better—so I can always easily find where I want to go in a file. Most likely that’s the end of the file so a simple Meta+> suffices.

The same goes for global-auto-revert-mode. My workflow just doesn’t have the problem of other processes updating files I’m working on so the overhead isn’t worth it to me.

Other folks will certainly have preferences that differ from mine so it’s worthwhile taking a look at the video. The run time is 15 minutes, 40 seconds so plan accordingly.

On Today’s Episode of the Punch Out:

The Coming Medicaid Purge

Mali and France Part Ways?

Ex-Honduran President Faces Drug Charges

The boys take a quiz that makes you old. Then, Will talks to Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat about the upcoming Belmarsh Tribunal, an attempt to hold U.S. and U.K. governments accountable for war crimes and wrongful imprisonments done in the name of the War on Terror. They discuss imprisonments of whistleblowers, extra-judicial surveillance, breaking mass media blackout of reporting on western war crimes and more.

All you need to know about the Belmarsh Tribunal here: https://progressive.international/

Tickets for our southern tour still on sale here: chapotraphouse.com/live

Guest: Mary Dejevsky. We talk about the recent communications between US, NATO and Russia with a realistic view of Russia and Ukraine. In a bonus segment we talk about why the UK establishment is hostile toward Russia. 

Mary Dejevsky is a veteran journalist and columnist, a former  foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris, Washington and a special correspondent in China. She has written about the collapse of the USSR from inside Moscow and she is an expert on relations between Russia and the western world. She now writes for several media outlets across the political spectrum.

FOLLOW Mary Dejevsky on Twitter @marydejevsky, read her columns at the Independent, at Spiked and The Spectator. Also look for her writing and appearances on various media outlets.  

Around the Empire aroundtheempire.com is listener supported, independent media.

SUBSCRIBE/FOLLOW on Rokfin rokfin.com/aroundtheempire, Patreon patreon.com/aroundtheempire, Paypal paypal.me/aroundtheempirepod, YouTube youtube.com/aroundtheempire, Spotify, iTunes, iHeart, Google Podcasts

FOLLOW @aroundtheempire and @joanneleon.  Join us on TELEGRAM https://t.me/AroundtheEmpire

Find everything on http://aroundtheempire.com  and linktr.ee/aroundtheempire

Recorded on January 29, 2022. Music by Fluorescent Grey.

Reference Links:

1. Zbigniew Brzezinski at the Wilson Center June 2014: Mutual Security on Hold? Russia, the West, and European Security Architecture
2. Ukraine’s president is the voice of reason in stand-off with Russia, Mary Dejevsky, The Independent
3. What Putin really wants, Mary Dejevsky, Spiked Online
4. What the US and UK get wrong about Ukraine, Mary Dejevsky, Spiked Online
5. 5,000 helmets and Germany’s dark history in Ukraine, Mary Dejevsky, The Spectator

The music world lost legendary hip hop producer and artist J Dilla far too soon, and for many people, he's still relatively unknown. Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk with author Dan Charnas about his book on J Dilla's rhythmic innovation, artistry and close relationships with Common, Questlove, D'Angelo and more. Plus, the hosts review new albums from Big Thief and Sarah Shook & the Disarmers.

Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T

Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc

Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnG

Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU

Record a Voice Memo: 

https://bit.ly/2RyD5Ah

Featured Songs:

Slum Village, "Fall In Love," Fantastic, Vol. 2, GoodVibe, 2000

Big Thief, "Change," Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, 4AD, 2022

Big Thief, "Red Moon," Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, 4AD, 2022

Big Thief, "Spud Infinity," Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, 4AD, 2022

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, "No Mistakes," Nightroamer, Thirty Tigers, 2022

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, "I Got This," Nightroamer, Thirty Tigers, 2022

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, "Please Be A Stranger," Nightroamer, Thirty Tigers, 2022

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, "Believer," Nightroamer, Thirty Tigers, 2022

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, "Talkin' To Myself," Nightroamer, Thirty Tigers, 2022

J Dilla, "Workinonit," Donuts, Stones Throw, 2006

D'Angelo, "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," Voodoo, Virgin, 2000

J Dilla, "So Far to Go (feat. Common & D'Angelo)," The Shining, BBE, 2006

Common, "The Light," Like Water For Chocolate, Geffen, 2000

D'Angelo, "Devil's Pie," Voodoo, Virgin, 2000

Common, "I Am Music (feat. Jill Scott)," Electric Circus, MCA, 2002

The Pharcyde, "Runnin'," Labcabincalifornia, Delicious Vinyl, 1995

Spelling, "Little Deer," The Turning Wheel, Sacred Bones, 2021

Click here for the full episode, including an extended interview with Rania Khalek.

Breakthrough News’ Rania Khalek recounts her horrifying travel nightmare:

“So I went to Cuba and it was terrifying… just like Marco Rubio said.”

Then she laughs and proceeds to share an enlightening and inspiring story of a country perpetually beat down by the US that still continues to survive. Seeing the stellar healthcare, education, and public safety of a poorer nation only underscores that we’re doing something wrong here.

She explains:

“When you see how this poor country, which is poor because of the US, spends all of its revenue providing medical care and education for everybody, it really tells you something about the US system.

I walked around all of Havana and not one person begged for money. That was astounding to me after being in New York.

Plus, Rania, who’s currently based in Beirut, gives her on-the-scene takes on Syria, ISIS, and Ukraine mania. Subscribe now to hear it all.

It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out.

Subscribe now

Felix is joined by Tom (@tom_on_here) and Drew (@CanadasHost) to discuss Lucifer (2016), the show that dares to ask “what if Satan was a cool dude who owned a nightclub?”

Check out the Clayne Cast: https://soundcloud.com/user-607262935

And the GlobeHell Podcast: https://globehell.libsyn.com/

Krystal and Saagar talk about CIA spying, Biden's legal battle against student debtors, CNN imploding, Prince Andrew settlement, MSNBC ratings crash, big weed monopolies, and more!

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and Spotify

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl 

Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/

Daily Poster: https://www.dailyposter.com/

Matt Stoller: https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

yasnippet is great for coding. It allows you to set up abbreviations and get the editor to expand to the full code.

For example, when editing Javascript code, I type clo and press TAB, it would expand to:

console.log("object >>>", object)

and then prompt me to type the object that I want to inspect.

This functionality is handy in managing personal planning templates, too!

For example, I'm trying out Cal Newport's weekly planning method. For that, I have the following snippet:

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: my weekly plan template
# key: <wp
# --

* w$0
** Meta

** Work

** Side projects

** Health / Friends / Family

* Summary & Metrics

When planning for next week, I would create new org file, e.g., week8.org, and then invoke M-x yas-insert-template, select my weekly planning template, and start filling up the content.

Note: I rarely use the <wp shorthand. That's because I never remember it. All I remember is , I have a planning template in yasnippet, and now I just insert it. The next move is just to invoke the right M-x command.

The template has nothing fancy: just some org-mode headings to remind some important buckets of my life.

What's more important is, my template is plaintext and version controlled in Git, which allows to change and iterate on it as I grow.

And it works wonders for me.

I got an email by reader Andrej this week, asking about ways to (ab)use frame recentering in Emacs so that when a split window is created, the frame would grow to make room.

So if you have a frame with 1000px width, and split the window to the right, it should enlargen to 2000px width. And then recenter.

The code turned out to be surprisingly easy. Maybe I’m just getting accustomed to all this Emacs stuff. (That’s happy news, in case you weren’t sure!!1)

(defun my/split-right-and-resize-frame ()
  (interactive)
  (split-window-right)
  (my/frame-double-width)
  (my/frame-recenter))

(defun my/frame-double-width (&optional frame)
  (let* ((current_width (frame-pixel-width frame))
         (double_width (* 2 current_width)))
    (set-frame-width frame double_width nil t)))

(global-set-key [remap split-window-right] #'my/split-right-and-resize-frame)

• my/frame-recenter is taken from my post on frame centering
• set-frame-width accepts pixel width when you set the 4th parameter to t

Looks like what it says on the tin:

Before and after the split

To limit the doubling to your monitor’s size:

(defun my/frame-double-width (&optional frame)
  (let* ((current_width (frame-pixel-width frame))
         (monitor_width (nth 2 (frame-monitor-workarea frame)))
         (double_width (min monitor_width
                          (* 2 current_width))))
    (set-frame-width frame double_width nil t)))

Receive Christian’s new posts via email

In the first episode of a two-part special, archaeologist Mike Pitts answers listener questions on the most famous prehistoric site in Britain. Speaking to David Musgrove, he discusses how Stonehenge was built – and why.

(Ad) Mike Pitts is the author of How to Build Stonehenge (Thames & Hudson, 2022). Buy it now from Waterstones:

https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-TTClub&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fhow-to-build-stonehenge%2Fmike-pitts%2F%2F9780500024195%3Fawaid%3D3787%26utm_source%3Dredbrain%26utm_medium%3Dshopping%26utm_campaign%3Dcss%26gclid%3DCj0KCQiAnuGNBhCPARIsACbnLzpsBA_shuubuZPKpKG0GYoG5FSn-YLJkUjZS3M0BBv9ZWfutkfZMKsaAt0uEALw_wcB

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Krystal and Saagar talk about Ukraine's response to American media warmongering, NBC spreading propaganda from Ukrainian Nazis and the US deep state, Canada's targeting of Trucker bank accounts, woke school board recall elections, CNN drama causing a meltdown behind the scenes, how Democrats lost the working class, dangerous comparisons of Putin to Hitler, and the history of corporate elites selling out to China!

To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/

To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and Spotify

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl 

Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/

Bob Kuttner: https://prospect.org/topics/robert-kuttner/ 

Greenberg’s Piece: https://prospect.org/politics/democrats-speak-to-working-class-discontent/ 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ve been gradually building some little tools for myself to enhance the web development experience in Prolog. My “day job” is still primarily Clojure, but I really enjoy using Prolog and I’d like to bring the experience of building web apps up to par.

I couple of years ago, I made a pack for generating CSS from Prolog terms (in the style of Garden for Clojure). It was nice enough and made it possible to write more of the parts of a web-app in (SWI-)Prolog, in conjunction with the built-in html_write library for generating the HTML with DCGs (analogous Clojure’s Hiccup), but the lack of a nice story for client-side javascript made building the sort of very interactive things I do with Clojure + Clojurescript not as feasible.

I’d looked at doing some shenanigans, using pengines and vue to have some sort of “live” experience while mostly writing Prolog, but I didn’t love that approach.

More recently, having started using Girouette in Clojure to do styling in the manner of Tailwind and really liking that approach, I ported Girouette to Prolog (a pretty fun exercise in itself!). With this, I had a very nice way of generating styled HTML in Prolog, but the interactive piece was still missing.

I got a final piece of inspiration from reading about Phoenix’s “LiveView” and Rail’s “Hotwire”. This seemed much easier than the “boil the ocean” approach of running Prolog on the client side and so, I hacked together a little single-js-file library that implements just enough of the “live HTML” idea to work.

I put together a little Proof-of-Concept TODO-list type thing (source here) and then, more recently, a Wordle “assistant” (source).

Building that was quite fun; I was pleasantly surprised how well just that tiny bit of javascript worked to let me build a usable little site. It also has the nice attribute of gracefully degrading – if you use the sites with Javascript turned off, they still work fine! Deploying is also very smooth – I just pull the repo with the code on the server, connect a top-level to the running process, run make and boom, Prolog automatically re-compiles the changed predicates and the app is updated seamlessly.

There was just one nagging little thing that was bugging me in my dev experience. While the “tailwind” watcher would automatically update the CSS when the files containing the code changed, I would have to remember to also reload the code, so when the page refreshed, the server was sending the corresponding new HTML. It’s easy enough to do – C-c C-z to switch to the *prolog* buffer, make. to recompile, refresh, continue – but it was easy to forget and would knock me out of my flow. Having the CSS update just as the file changed made me subconsciously expect the rest of the code to work the same way, I think.

That, in addition to some comments on the SWI-Prolog Discourse, planted the idea in my head that I should build something that would automatically run make. whenever any dependent files changed. Prolog already knows which files are of interest and I’d used inotify before, so it seemed straight-forward enough to do. The wrinkle though was that I knew using inotify by just using the pack would limit my tool to only working on Linux. I’d had issues previously with someone unable to use my tailwind_pl library because it depended on inotify, even though it was only needed at “dev time”, not if one wanted to just one-off generate the CSS. Since there isn’t (yet?) a way to have conditional dependencies in packs, I’d handled the tailwind case by splitting it into two libraries: The main tailwind_pl pack that contains the file-watcher code and tailwind_pl_generate that depends only on my css_write pack and should work anywhere.

In this case though, it would be nice if I could just make it work on multiple platforms. As I’ve written about before, SWI’s FFI is quite nice, so it was short work to put together a little “foreign module” in C that uses inotify on Linux and kqueue on macOS to monitor for file changes, then write a tiny bit of Prolog to use that module to run make as needed. Pretty slick!

However…I didn’t want to also leave Windows users out in the dark (they already suffer so much, the poor dears). I don’t have access to a Windows machine, but Jan suggested cross-compiling with mingw64 plus Wine to test. He’d already made a docker image, which he uses for creating the Windows builds of SWI, so it was straightforward enough to get that all set up.

Well, in theory. In actuality, it took me longer to figure out how to use docker, the various flags I needed to pass and environment variables I needed to set to build a dll than it took to actually write the code, but I persevered. Using the API was pretty simple, although Windows’ versions of inotify/kqueue, as best I can tell, only lets you monitor directories for changes, not particular files. Not a huge deal for my use-case – it might create redundant watches and be triggered unnecessarily, but that’s not really much of a problem.

Once I had this working though, I wanted someone to be able to test it on Windows. However…just running pack_install/2 failed, since it needed a toolchain to be able to build the foreign library and my very generous test subject didn’t have MingW or MSys installed. That instilled my next idea: I’d started trying to use sourcehut more, so why not take advantage of its features and set up a .build.yml to do the cross-compilation?

That would take care of two things, if I could get it to work: Firstly, Windows users would be able to just download the file with the DLL in it and not need a tool-chain installed. Secondly, I could make the build stage generate a zip, so I could use a simpler pack_install incantation. Previously, I’d had to install the pack from git, which necessitated passing several options to pack_install and was kind of a pain, because sourcehut only automatically generates a tar.gz archive for releases, but library(pack) gets confused by the double suffix.

So, with ropes.pl as a convenient example, I dove in. It took the better part of a day of watching jobs fail, editing the manifest, re-running, and watching it fail in a new way, but I finally got it working! I have to say that the experience of debugging was actually fantastic. The fact that sourcehut lets you edit a failing build manifest and re-submit it without having to make a new commit definitely saved my sanity, not to mention that it lets you ssh in to the failed build server so you can poke around and see what’s what. Without those two things, I probably would either still be at it now, or have finally renounced all my worldly possessions and moved to the woods.

As all my Prolog posts seem to conclude, I really do like this language and ecosystem. I would submit that it has Christopher Alexander’s “Quality Without a Name”; it just makes one warm and fuzzy to be working with. If you happen to be a Prolog developer, check out automake and let me know what you think! The next thing I’d really like to add is some sort of “hook” to be run after make; that would let me use that instead of inotify directly for my tailwind watcher and would also let me rig up some neat thing to make the browser automatically update as well…but I do have actual work that I need to get to at some point.

Soon!

For more implementation details, see part two

We take our semi-annual look at the Super Bowl through commercials and what they predict about our future. Then it’s back to Joe Brandon as we discuss former Obama aid David Axelrod’s advice to POTUS on how to navigate his upcoming State of the Union address.

Tickets for our southern tour still on sale here: chapotraphouse.com/live

On Today’s Episode of the Punch Out:

US-Russia Tensions Continue

Nevada Death Penalty Debacle

Russiagate Still Going?