zone is an interactive compiled Lisp function.
It is bound to <menu-bar> <tools> <games> <zone>.
(zone)
Zone out, completely.

It’s basically an emacs screensaver/psychedelic ascii mode using your focused buffer for content. It obfuscates the buffer in ways which involves wrapping your code around the screen or swapping characters around, and even just turning it all into curly braces and wiggling. Press a key to undo it all. Might be a neat trick to play on a friend, but I see no other usage for this mode.

Diagram for XMPP connection
One of the most difficult part when developping a new XMPP client is the connection mechanism workflow. Tim Bielawa has drawn a state transitions diagram that might be very helpful to thousands of developpers worldwide.

Now that’s pretty exciting! I hope some one else may find it useful.

Short story shorter, the update changes the path to the erlang-mode.el file so before you can M-x erlang-mode again you’ll have you fix your Emacs load-path to register the new location. (See my older post on how to initially set up Erlang and Emacs from MacPorts from scratch)

The new load commands should be:

(setq load-path (cons  "/opt/local/lib/erlang/lib/tools-2.6.5/emacs/" load-path))
(setq erlang-root-dir "/opt/local/lib/erlang")
(setq exec-path (cons "/opt/local/bin" exec-path))
(require 'erlang-start)

It just requires changing the tools-x.x.x to 2.6.5.

p.s. about erlang-mode

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/local/bin/dblatex", line 16, in <module>
    from dbtexmf.dblatex import dblatex
ImportError: No module named dbtexmf.dblatex

I got past it by exporting PYTHONPATH=/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages, but clearly this was not optimal. I was about to file a bug report about the issue but before I did that I read their new ticket guidelines which requested the full build log be included in the ticket.

In the build log was the solution. I would have missed it had my shell scrollback not been set to unlimited. Nestled a good 182 lines back in my buffer was this little message:

--->  Installing python26 @2.6.4_0+darwin
--->  Activating python26 @2.6.4_0+darwin
 
To fully complete your installation and make python 2.6 the default, please run
 
sudo port install python_select
sudo python_select python26

I did as instructed, and sure enough, dblatex started working! I just wanted to post this on the blog in case anyone else ran into this and missed it like I did.

If you’ve installed Erlang with Macports then you may have noticed that when you edit .erl files you’re not entering into erlang-mode, nor is it available to enter into. Here’s how I got erlang-mode working on my system.

Macports will install Erlang into /opt/local/lib/erlang by default. The paths to put in your .emacs file provided in the erlang-mode documentation only need to be tweaked a slight bit to function properly. Here’s what I put in mine:

(setq load-path (cons  "/opt/local/lib/erlang/lib/tools-2.6.4/emacs/" load-path))
(setq erlang-root-dir "/opt/local/lib/erlang")
(setq exec-path (cons "/opt/local/bin" exec-path))
(require 'erlang-start)

Note that you may require setting “tools-2.6.4″ to something else if Macports has upgraded it’s distribution of Erlang.

Setting up your $MANPATH variable is fairly simple as well. Just put the string “/opt/local/lib/erlang/man” in a file called ‘erlang’ in /etc/manpaths.d/ and make sure it ends with an empty line. Test this by opening a new terminal and running: echo $MANPATH | grep erlang. If it doesn’t come back empty then you’ve done it right.

(defun previous-window ()
  "As other-buffer, except in the other-direction"
  (interactive)
  (other-window -1))
 
(global-set-key "\C-c\o" 'previous-window)

Put in your .emacs file and activate with C-c o when you have multiple frames open at once.

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