Then I found twittering-mode.el.

This is a cakewalk to install and use!

You simply need to follow the few basic instructions from the wiki here: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TwitteringMode

When you run twittering-mode for the first time, you will be prompted to login to the twmode twitter app (via a browser). Enter your credentials and you will receive a pin, which you will then enter into the next prompt from the mode. The OAuth authentication requirements are satisfied by use of the twmode twitter app.

Easy peasy, as some of you would probably say.

UPDATE

To avoid repeatedly retrieving and entering a pin, you can store the encrypted tokens in a local file by enabling:
(setq twittering-use-master-password t)

At this time, you need to download the latest .el file (from the HEAD branch) in order to get this to work:
http://github.com/hayamiz/twittering-mode/raw/master/twittering-mode.el

Enter the mode and follow the prompts to set the master password.

Then, instead of needing to get and enter pins from the twmode twitter app, you simply enter the master password.

For more info on this, see http://github.com/hayamiz/twittering-mode/blob/master/NEWS.

Cheers!

But I finally broke through, setting up gnus in my work cygwin environment.

This is probably not going to be the best tutorial I’ve ever written. But it follows my preferred method for learning- start with a working setup, and then figure out how it works. This is different than much of what I see for gnus documentation- which provides some vague concepts and equally vague configuration details. So this will get you started, but you’re going to have to figure out why it works the way it does, and how to improve this setup, just as I am.

Here are the steps I’ve taken:

Via cygwin, I installed emacs 23.2-1 and gnutls-2.8.6-1

I added this to my emacs config. I saw some instructions that suggested you could put this in gnus.el, but when I did that gnus broke without a useful error message.

Open up emacs, start gnus with M-x gnus

It takes a while to start up. I get an “unable to open server nntp+news, go offline? I respond n

nntp (news) open error: ”. Continue? I respond y

Gnus auto save file exists. Do you want to read it? I respond y

Next I should see some debug output when it goes to get your mail from gmail.

I can see it downloads some mail.

Next gnus displays a set of newsgroups, including some help messages I did not find helpful at all.

To find your mail, enter “B”, this will prompt you for “Which back end:” type nnml. It will prompt for “Address:” hit enter.

You will see a group “mail.misc”, this is your email. Hit enter to view the list of mail downloaded.

typing ‘m’ will prompt you to create an email. Fill out the fields and when you’re finished, type C-c C-c to send. Sending will prompt you for your password.

That’s all for now.

And with this change, I’ve suddenly been introduced to the world of JavaHL. So what is JavaHL? Per the previous link, it’s the Java language binding for the Subversion API. On Windows the subclipse project is able to package JavaHL, but not on other operating systems. So that’s why I’ve never had to deal with it before.

Fortunately, after finding out what JavaHL actually is, it’s pretty easy to install on Ubuntu, as you might expect:

sudo apt-get install libsvn-java

This will install JavaHL to /usr/lib/jni as a standard install, and this is where eclipse will look for it by default. If you’ve installed it in a non-standard way, you might want to look at this link regarding overwriting the java.library.path with an eclipserc file.

My first issue came with Step 1:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa

This issue I had was that the keyserver was down. This may not always be a problem, but based on a few google searches it’s hardly an uncommon problem.
I found my solution with this article:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/PPA_NAME/ppa/ubuntu UBUNTU_VERSION main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys XXXXXXX

My next issue was with Step 2:

sudo apt-get install gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-bin gvfs-fuse libgvfscommon0 ifuse libgpod-dev libgpod-common libiphone-utils libiphone0 python-iphone libplist++1 libplist-utils python-plist libusb-1.0-0 libusb-1.0-0-dev libusbmuxd1 usbmuxd

I replaced libiphone-utils with libimobiledevice-utils, and removed python-iphone from the list.

And lastly, Step 5:
I created /mnt/ipod

mkdir -p /mnt/ipod

and made it sufficiently writable. I did not need to do anything else in this step!

sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/69365/rubygems-1.3.6.tgz
 tar -zxvf rubygems-1.3.6.tgz
 cd rubygems-1.3.6/
 sudo ruby setup.rb
 sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
 sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rake

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev uuid-dev

sudo gem install ncursesw

 # We need this extra package
 sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev
 sudo gem install sup
 sup

Also had to make one code change, described here

#optional
#installed offlineimap
sudo apt-get install offlineimap

Links
Sup RubyForge Wiki
Use offlineimap with gmail – add some hooks
Setting up offlineimap for gmail backup
handy script examples to add sources

So I figured, hey I know enough bash to at least get something rolling in order to do this. Of course I had to keep looking stuff up in reference guides and on websites, because there’s no way I can remember it all. Basically, it came down to 4 key tools for going the bash route.

1. sed – to strip brackets, slashes, colons, spaces, and other undesired characters in order to make the strings easier to deal with
2. awk – to find the location of decimal points or other characters
3. cut – to get characters to the left or right of decimal points
4. bc – to calculate and convert the milliseconds to human readable form

I finally got it to work reliably tonight.
It was a horrid process that took forever. What a waste of time. But hey, that’s all part of the RTC experience!
So here it is, please excuse the bad variable names and sloppiness. I was too pissed to give a ****.
Note: I renamed this to xmms2tracklensafe and cut out all the curse words and tried to put some sense into the comments.

#!/bin/bash
tmpfileinfo=xtemp14251.tmp
tmpfile=xtemp91839.tmp
#use xmms2 info here
xmms2 info > $tmpfileinfo
vargrep=$(grep "duration" $tmpfileinfo)
echo $vargrep > $tmpfileinfo
#chopping the brackets, slashes, and spaces out of the string
sed -i 's/\[//g' $tmpfileinfo
sed -i 's/\]//g' $tmpfileinfo
sed -i 's/\///g' $tmpfileinfo
sed -i 's/'\ '//g' $tmpfileinfo
#convert the = to an X, easy to find
sed -i 's/\=/X/g' $tmpfileinfo
#for an mp3 - pluginmaddurationX
sed -i 's/\pluginmaddurationX//g' $tmpfileinfo
#for a flac - pluginflacdurationX
sed -i 's/\pluginflacdurationX//g' $tmpfileinfo
#God knows what other codecs there might be
#prints the time in milliseconds
echo "$(cat $tmpfileinfo) ms"
vargrep2=$(cat $tmpfileinfo)
varx=$vargrep2
#convert the time to minutes
var2=$(echo "$varx/1000/60" | bc -l)
echo $var2 > $tmpfile
#we are left with a fraction of a minute, which occurs after the decimal, we need to find the decimal point
var3=$(awk 'BEGIN { print index('$var2', ".") }')
#get the characters after the decimal point, this is our fraction of a minute
var4=$(cut -c $var3- $tmpfile)
#convert that fraction of a minute into seconds
var5=$(echo "scale=1; $var4*60" | bc -l | xargs printf "%1.0f")
#simply subtracting a 1 from the index of the decimal point, to be used in order to retrieve the number left of the decimal
varcut=$(echo "$var3 - 1" | bc -l | xargs printf "%1.0f")
#gets the number to the left of the decimal
var6=$(cut -c -$varcut $tmpfile)
#now we need to deal with the decimal in the number that has been converted to seconds
var7=$(awk 'BEGIN { print index('$var5', ".") }')
varcut2=1
#I honestly don't remember why I did this.  I think I needed it before I started adding | xargs printf "%1.0f"
if [ "0" != $var7 ]
	then
		varcut2=$(echo "$var7 - 1" | bc -l | xargs printf "%1.0f")
fi

echo $var5 > $tmpfile
#now we get the seconds as a whole number, by getting the characters left of the decimal
var8=$(cut -c -$varcut2 $tmpfile)
var8=$(cat $tmpfile)

#need to prepend a 0 to the seconds if they are under 10
if [ $var8 -lt 10 ]
	then
		var8="0$var8"
fi

#print out the time in human readable form, minutes : seconds
echo "$var6:$var8"
#clean up the temp files
rm -f $tmpfile
rm -f $tmpfileinfo

Wow, what a pain in the pee-hole. It took me several hours over two nights and I even lost some sleep over it. So, I decided to try it Jeff’s way, using Python, since he brags about it so much. I had never used it before, and now that I have, I think I’ll be using it a lot! A lot of you are saying, “Well yeah, duh. Idiot.” or something more insulting, and I fully accept that. In fact, I encourage it!

First, we have the simple bash script that is used to execute the entire process from the command line.

#!/bin/bash

tmpfile=assscrambler124524.tmp
xmms2 info > $tmpfile

python ~/scripts/xmms2len.py

rm -f $tmpfile

And now we have the giant, complex, and horrendous python script.

file = open('./assscrambler124524.tmp')
for line in file:
	if(line.find('duration',0) > -1) :
		#print(line)
		s = line
		searchstr = 'duration = ';
		x = s.rindex(searchstr, 0);
		if(x > -1):
			timeMillis = s[x+len(searchstr):len(s)].strip()
			#print(timeMillis)
			timeConverted = float(timeMillis)/1000/60
			#print(timeConverted);
			stime = str(timeConverted)
			decIndex = stime.rindex('.', 0)
			timeFraction = float(stime[decIndex:len(stime)])
			seconds = int(round(timeFraction*60,0))
			strseconds = str(seconds)
			minutes = stime[0:decIndex]
			strminutes = str(minutes)
			if(seconds < 10) :
				strseconds = '0' + str(seconds)
			print(timeMillis + ' ms\n' + str(minutes) + ':' + strseconds)
			break

Wait, that's it? Just some simple searches, substrings, calculations, easy conversions between types, and that's all? Not to mention the incredibly easy way to open a file and iterate through its lines.
Now, I commented out some print statements here, and I could have compacted it more, but I wanted it to be reasonably clear. The point of course, and 95% of you know probably know this already, is that python kicks bash's ass when it comes to things that should be, well, programs. Of course bash scripts will always have their place, and they are necessary for so many things. I still love bash and am very fond of it, but from a programming perspective, it just doesn't "cut the mustard", as Jeff would say.

Well, that's it for my exciting Friday night. Someday I'll get my crap together and talk more about my xmms2 setup, the xmms2 python equalizer, the xmms2 scrobbler for last.fm, and the other scripts I've written for xmms2.

Cya!

My main reference for python: http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~warner/prog/python.html

From your home directory:

mkdir bin lib tmp
chmod 777 tmp
chmod 755 bin lib

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/lib/pkgconfig" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib:/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile

source ~/.bash_profile

cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib/2.19/glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
tar -xvzf glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
cd glib-2.19.8
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

glib should now be installed. If you ran into any errors fix those before moving on.

cd ~/tmp
wget http://mcabber.com/files/mcabber-0.9.9.tar.bz2
bunzip2 mcabber-0.9.9.tar.bz2
cd mcabber-0.9.9
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Then follow these directions to set up.

Per the comments, remember to delete your tmp dir when you’re done. Or else don’t chmod 777 this directory.


#!/bin/bash

echo $WORD > $TEMPFILE
aspell -c $TEMPFILE
cat $TEMPFILE
rm -f $TEMPFILE
rm -f $TEMPFILE.bak


I named this script “spell”. Simply use it like so:

$ spell reccomend


Aspell will run and you can make your changes.

reccomend

1) recommends 6) commend
2) recommend 7) recommenced
3) reckoned recommended
4) regiment 9) Redmond
5) recombined 0) rejoined
i) Ignore I) Ignore all
r) Replace R) Replace all
a) Add l) Add Lower
b) Abort x) Exit


In this case, if I type “2″, the correction will be made, aspell will exit and the spelling I chose gets printed out.

Here’s an example of how to use it with a sentence.

$ spell "I go to the storede and buy beakh clotes"


Now aspell will take you through each misspelled word. After you finish the corrections it will exit and print out the corrected sentence or series of words.

I go to the store and buy beach clothes