<p>Now that GNU Emacs 25.1 has been released, it is time for my customary “how to install Emacs 25.1 on a recent Ubuntu” post. In my case I’m using XUbuntu 16.04, but the instructions are pretty much the same for just about every recent Ubuntu version. The package versions of the referenced packages differ, but the package names haven’t changed since I first published one of these posts.</p>

<p>This blog is self-hosted, together with some other services on a FreeBSD virtual server over at <a href="https://www.rootbsd.net/">RootBSD</a>. Yes, I’m one of those weirdos who hosts their own servers - even if they’re virtual - instead of just using free or buying services.</p>

<p>I switched jobs in October last year and getting up to speed in the new role did take priority over anything else, so I had to put a few other endeavours including this blog on hold for a little while.</p>

<p>The <a href="http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/">Hack 2.0</a> font got a lot of attention recently as a font specifically designed for use with source code. So of course I had to try it out in Emacs. I started with installing it on Mac OS X as that’s the OS I use most for work and work - like activities.</p>

<p>As a lot of people keep pointing out over and over again, a job ad is an <em>ad</em>. Its often forgotten purpose is to get someone competent excited enough about your company and the job opening you’re trying to fill to send in a well crafted resume with a well crafted cover email[^1].</p>

<p>I’ve moved from using <a href="https://httpd.apache.org/">Apache</a> as a web server to <a href="http://nginx.org/en/">nginx</a> for various projects. The machines I’m running these projects on are a somewhat resource constrained and nginx deals with low resource machines much better than Apache does and tends to serve content faster in those circumstances. For example switching the machine that hosts this WordPress blog from Apache and mod_php to nginx with php-fpm improved the…

<p>Artur Malabarba over on Endless Parentheses has a <a href="http://endlessparentheses.com/embedding-youtube-videos-with-org-mode-links.html?source=rss">short post</a> about embedding a YouTube video directly from org-mode. I haven’t tried using it in org2blog yet, but I’m hoping/expecting that it’ll work there, too.</p>

<p>I’ve recently switched to using homebrew as my source for Emacs on OS X  after seeing <a href="http://struct.tumblr.com/post/46754394733/emacs-24-use-homebrew-instead-of-emacsformacosx">this blog post by Philip Ingram</a>.</p>

<p>I <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2015/08/05/smartphones-computers-need-regular-patching/">recently</a> blogged about Google and Samsung starting to offer regular security patches for their Android devices.</p>

<p>I’ve been doing a reasonable amount of <a href="http://clojure.org/">Clojure</a> development recently and like a lot of other Lisp dialect have marveled at the ease of separately pulling out the keys and values from a map. This is a very common operation after all, but C++ does only appear to support manual key or value extraction from a std::map.</p>