Lisp question

[Niranjan Rao]

Hello,

I am trying my hand on customizing emacs to adjust for some of my
requirements. After struggling with lisp I am facing some problems. I
know that these questions are trivial but I could not figure out how to
do it. Please be gentle when you point out obvious mistakes as my
knowledge of lisp is next to nothing.

1. I have bunch of entries in diary for which I would like to have
   reminder on before the day of the entry. This is to say, for some
   entries I wanted to be reminded say 3 days before till the date of
   the entries. For some entries it might be 2 days or a week.
   After noting the &%%   syntax in diary file I thought that I could use to
evaluate the
   expression. I was thinking of using date-to-day function for date
   used by calendar and my date under consideration and was going to
   determine the difference to determine if the diary entry was worth
   displaying. However I could not figure out to convert the date into
   the format date-to-day function expects. Can some one please let me
   know how to achieve this.

2. I discovered defadvice functionality while reading the lisp
   manual. I tried using it in following way
        (defadvice jde-debug (before jde-bug-remove-dead-processes)
              (jde-bug-remove-dead-processes))

        (defadvice jde-debug (after nhr-jde-bug-show-buf last)
                  (jde-bug-show-locals-buf)
          (jde-bug-show-cli-buf))
        (ad-activate 'jde-debug)
  My intention is to remove earlier dead process that jde has created
  before the java debugger is run and make sure that local variable buffer
  and cli buffer are displayed after the debugger starts. The first
  part works perfectly however the after part for the
  defadvice fails in the sense that it only shows cli  buffer but
   fails to display local variable buffer. What am I doing wrong ?

Thanks for the help,

- Niranjan