Death and taxes

It's that time of the year again to start filing taxes, and here in Belgium we are "blessed" to be able to use our Belgian eid to file those taxes electronically at our governments Tax on Web site.

Linux support

Officialy, there are some drivers available for Redhat and Ubuntu 9.10. However, remembering last years debacle of trying to follow those instructions, I decided to not stumble into that tarpit and just did a bit of googling around. After pulling together some various bits and pieces, this is what I did to make it work:

1. $ sudo apt-get install libacr38u libacr38ucontrol0 beid-tools pcscd libpcsclite-dev beidgui libbeid2 libbeidlibopensc2
     

2. Reboot. Yes, I know this is Linux and I know it is 2010. The problem is the pcscd service won't start properly without a reboot. If you have a better clue then I do, you can probably fix this without a reboot, but there it is.
3. Launch firefox and navigate to file:///usr/share/beid/beid-pkcs11-register.html Depending on your version of Firefox that may or may not properly install the pkcs11 module. For me it did not so I moved on to the next step.
4. In firefox, navigate to Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Security Devices Click on Load and fill out file:///usr/lib/libbeidpkcs11.so.2 as the Module filename. Then click OK.

After these steps I was able to log in to the Tax on Web site. Hope this is helpful to somebody else out there.

Slimy emacs

Slimy emacs
This blog entry is being typed in emacs21. I finally decided to clear the hurdle and start learning myself emacs and try to wrestle through Paul Graham's "On lisp". Starting out with emacs has been fun, I've been working through the included tutorial, and the shortcut system already feels powerfull. Writing / programming without having to move my hand from keyboard to mouse is a really enticing prospect to me, and I'm intent on getting through the 36% of TUTORIAL remaining. This also seems like a really good time to finally trade in my azerty keyboard for a real one, which will have the added bonus of no longer having to adjust when switching from typing at home to typing at work.

Anyway, emacs and lisp. So on to lisp, I first downloaded slime for emacs, and after including the following short lisp snippet in my .emacs file tried to launch it:


(add-to-list 'load-path "/home//slime-2.0")
(require 'slime)
(setq inferior-lisp-program "clisp")
(add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook (lambda () (slime-mode t)
(local-set-key "\r" 'newline-and-indent)
(setq lisp-indent-function 'common-lisp-indent-function)
(setq indent-tabs-mode nil)))


Obviously, no clisp could be found since I'd been dumb enough to not install it first. So on to the next step of installing lisp. Now, my first version of my .emacs file did not refer to clisp, rather it refered to lisp as I was following the short tutorial on unmutual.info and had chosen to use CMU Common Lisp. Right, so how to install CMU Common Lisp on my Ubuntu install, I visited the CMU Common Lisp website but then decided I'd rather use the synaptic packet manager. After a search for "lisp" presented me with a huge list of packages to install, I spent a good 10 minutes just skimming through them all untill I finally settled for the clisp package. A brief few seconds later, clisp and it's dependencies were installed and all I had to do was to edit my .emacs file to update my inferior-lisp-program from "lisp" to "clisp". Restart emacs, M-x slime, a quick compile and tada, slime ! Cool, now I just have 20% of emacs TUTORIAL and Paul Graham's "On Lisp" left to digest.