Spellcheck in Vi/m

I’ve been using vi for 20+ years and somehow I didn’t know that it has spell check built in 🤷‍♂

Enable it by simply :set spell

Now misspelled words are shown in red background 1 (depending on the terminal’s capability this might vary - I assume)

Off course, this is nowhere near full fledged LSP like ltex which I use with emacs and helix. ltext does more than spell check.

Yet having built-in spell checker is always nice.

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Markdown vs Orgmode

My thoughts in the context of this thread.

I did try org for some time (initially when I switched to Emacs) as mentioned here

But eventually I realized that markdown is more pervasive.

I am aware that Org is supported outside of Emacs as well.

But compared to markdown, that is nothing.

But that is not necessarily the point.

e.g. When I do code review, most of the git service providers support markdown. I was surpised that even Azure git supports Markdown (So does gitlab, probably bitbucket as well, it as been a while since I used bitbucket.)

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Respect and Authority

Why do we “listen” to somebody ?

Here I do not mean hearing when I say listen

I mean obey or follow.

I think it comes from either respect or authority.

Authority maybe given by someone else

e.g. Teacher in school, boss at work, parents at home.

Lot of times, most people do what these people tell you to do, because of the authority inferred on them.

Because you are “supposed to” do what they say.

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Rails is not ruby

I had written earlier how learning the language before the framework is more important.

It is important to know which parts is part of the language, and which comes from the framework.

This becomes more important when there are defacto web frameworks (rails in ruby, django in python, phoenix in elixir.. maybe more) For a newcomer who is learning both the language and framework together (or back to back, or worse learning the language via the framework tutorials :shudders: )

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Trying Macports

I was aware of macports for quite some time (since I moved to macOS about 8 years ago) But most of the tools seem to be suggesting brew install, so I didn’t give macports a second thought.

8 years later, my MBP is old, and soon will not be supported by Apple and brew

While I upgraded to macOS monterey, this is going to be last version supported on this hardware.

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Interesting Netlify Build Problem

After build problems with my PKM site, today I ran into another problem with this site.

What puzzled me was Deploy showed Build step failing but no useful error (other than exit code 2 - which does not help much)

But in the process of debugging, I learnt 1 about the environment variable NETLIFY_BUILD_DEBUG (set to true when needed) It did not help 😞

I also upgraded hugo version (which is another environment variable) in the process.

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Pass request specific context to Sidekiq

In a multi-tenant rails application, usually we extract the tenant, before we process it further. Sometimes, the process requires us to process the data in background (via Sidekiq) and because the background job also needs to query the DB, it also needs to set tenant.

Turns out, we can pass “some” data from the controller to the sidekiq job via ActiveSupport::CurrentAttributes While, sidekiq may need to set the tenant again (for more DB queries) but one can save at least one query (to find out the account itself)

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Migrating PKM Site : Updates

As mentioned here and later here I recently moved PKM from Dendron to obsidian-zola

The original code seems abadoned (No updates in little over a year). I understand this since it is likely built for personal use, and it works for them (FWIW, the demo site itself is not updated for exactly same duration)

Turns out people forked it and improved it.

At first I tried this fork, renamed as obsidian-zola-plus (as it made it better than the original) This one seemed active (updated little over 2 months ago. Yet 2 PRs are unmerged 🤷‍♂)

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Rename File in Emacs

First impression people have is that Emacs is an editor. So in an editor one should just save as to different name/path. 1

But save as is different from renaming a file. save as creates a copy of the file with a different name/path. So one has two files with old and new paths.

But rename leaves just one file at thenew path.

Older versions of Emacs (< Emacs 26) did not have this functionality built-in So either one had to use dired or people wrote their own functions.

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Read from Dead Letter Queue

As mentioned in the earlier post,

at work I was “strongly encouraged” to use Azure Service Bus, instead of RabbitMQ Unfortunately

SDK has FormatDeadLetterPath functionality but it is not available to HTTP REST API 1

Append /$DeadLetterQueue to the queue name.2

Refer to this SO comment


  1. Readers would remember that since Ruby is not officially supported by MS, we had to resort to using REST API to access the Azure Service Bus functionality. ↩︎

  2. It has to be exactly as it is with capitalization and all. Took me some time to realize that. MS Docs refer to it in all-lower-case, which does not work. ↩︎

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