Last on the wagon

Links for vim I should follow later.

2009-09-01T06:39:00.001-06:00

from http://www.duetsch.info/vim-plugins-tipps-und-tricks.html

EGG

2009-09-01T06:35:00.001-06:00

from http://wiki.github.com/bogolisk/egg

"""

Egg is not a git porcelain. It shares the same goals with git aliases , make it more convenient to perform common git operations . To use egg, simply compile the egg.el file then load the egg.elc file. You can put the egg.elc file somewhere in your emacs load-path and add (require 'egg) in your .emacs file.

Once activated, egg will turn on egg-minor-mode when a file was open in a git repository.

"""

I always forget the page for the keystrokes (the wiki above) so i'm linking it here.

Sound in rcirc for bitlbee

2009-06-25T07:55:00.001-06:00

I use bitlbee. A lot. It's almost the only thing i use anymore for IM's. But one thing i've missed is sound notifications when someone is talking to me, so i looked into rcirc and found some beep code on the emacs wiki.

hacked it up and here goes :


(add-hook 'rcirc-print-hooks 'my-rcirc-print-hook)
(setq alert "uri=file:///usr/share/sounds/purple/alert.wav")

(defun my-rcirc-print-hook (process sender response target text)
  (when (and (string-match (rcirc-nick process) text)
	     (not (string= (rcirc-nick process) sender))
	     (not (string= (rcirc-server-name process) sender)))
    (call-process "/usr/bin/gst-launch-0.10" nil nil nil "playbin" alert)
    )
  )

Grouping in gnus

2009-06-23T08:39:00.001-06:00

S-l-# to put a particular mailbox/newsgroup into #'s queue
then to check it
# g

Really handy if you subscribe to RSS like i do.

Also to remove white space lines

2009-06-22T06:46:00.001-06:00

In emacs, C-x C-o on a blank line will help you remove serious amounts of whitespace lines.

Really handy when you are coding or hit enter too many times in your writing.

browse kill ring

2009-06-22T06:43:00.001-06:00

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/download/browse-kill-ring.el

If you use emacs, you owe it to yourself to get this and add to your emacs:

(require 'browse-kill-ring)
(browse-kill-ring-default-keybindings)

Org mode as a day planner

2009-05-26T08:21:00.001-06:00

This is an article about how to use Org-mode as a day planner. I saw it on the org-mode homepage and it is a well thought out, well written article. Replete with examples that make sense and pretty code blocks, it offers several tips I'm going to start using. Such as multiple states and notes per state change.

Gnus scoring

2009-05-19T08:16:00.000-06:00

One really should go read this and then you can do things like

(setq gnus-summary-mark-below 0)

so that you stop getting emails in your Summary buffer from people that you really don't want to see anymore.

At least that's the plan.

todochiku.el

2009-05-17T08:24:00.000-06:00

Having been able to get something working in gnus, my next step is to get a notification in growl/snarl etc. To that end this should help move that along.

Spamassassin and gnus.

2009-05-17T08:21:00.000-06:00

Here is some information on how to get spamassassin to work with gnus. Well, actually it's a conf file, so if you don't get those yet, drop me a line.

xcite.el - citations

2009-05-14T15:01:00.001-06:00



(require 'xcite)
(autoload 'xcite "xcite" "Exciting cite" t)
(autoload 'xcite-yank-cur-msg "xcite" "Exciting cite" t)
(autoload 'xcite-indent-citation "xcite")
;;(setq message-citation-line-function nil message-citation-line-function 'xcite-indent-citation)
 (setq message-citation-line-function nil
        message-indent-citation-function
        'xcite-indent-citation)

(defun default-custom-header ()
    (format "On %s %s%s wrote:\n"
     date (or handle "") (if id (concat " (" id ")" ) "")))
(setq xcite:insert-header-function 'default-custom-header)

How to get my citation "on blah blah so and so wrote:" in xcite for citations.

So far so good. I'm only using the basic version, nothing too tricked out
and it puts in the name of the user as part of the "> wrote something. Ans etc etc" part of the mail body.

bbdb

2009-05-13T23:26:00.001-06:00

After installing and fighting bbdb for a bit, the following worked in my .gnus.el

Under my first hook:


(require 'bbdb)
(bbdb-initialize)
(add-hook 'gnus-startup-hook 'bbdb-insinuate-gnus)
(add-hook 'gnus-startup-hook 'bbdb-insinuate-message)

Then to save a person to the db, you use ':'
and to mail them, in the To: field hit to complete the name

.newsrc.eld

2009-05-12T21:38:00.001-06:00

If your summary is screwed up, best chances are that this has the offending summary line.

addenda

2009-05-12T00:46:00.000-06:00

added imap searching


require 'nnir



(setq gnus-select-method '(nnimap "imap.gmail.com"
           (nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com")
           (nnimap-server-port 993)
           (nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo")
	   (nnir-search-engine imap)
           (nnimap-stream ssl)))

my .gnus.el

2009-05-12T00:32:00.001-06:00

using .authinfo with


machine imap.gmail.com login livingood.pw@gmail.com password passwordoffun port 993
machine smtp.gmail.com login livingood.pw@gmail.com password passwordoffun port 587

and then


(setq user-mail-address "livingood.pw@gmail.com")
(setq user-full-name "Ben Livingood")
(load-library "smtpmail")
(load-library "nnimap")
(load-library "starttls")
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnimap "imap.gmail.com"
           (nnimap-address "imap.gmail.com")
           (nnimap-server-port 993)
           (nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.authinfo")
           (nnimap-stream ssl)))

(setq smtpmail-starttls-credentials '(("smtp.gmail.com" 587 nil nil))
      smtpmail-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
      smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp.gmail.com"
      send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
      message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
      smtpmail-smtp-service 587
      ;; smtpmail-auth-credentials '(("smtp.gmail.com"
      ;;  587
      ;;  "livingood.pw@gmail.com"
      ;;  nil))
)
(add-hook 'gnus-topic-mode-hook 'gnus-topic-mode)

(setq gnus-invalid-group-regexp "[:`'\"]\\|^$")
(setq gnus-ignored-newsgroups  "")
(setq gnus-outgoing-message-group "[Google Mail]/Sent Mail")

then S s for each group I want
oh and G c to set them always visible

to see all messages read or not, C-u RET on a group

now if there was a way to tag mails in gnus so I could perform an op on multiple messages. . .

My .emacs from a portable ubuntu distro @home

2009-05-11T09:08:00.001-06:00


(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/")
(require 'rcirc)
(require 'rcirc-extension)
;; (require 'twit)

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b") 'browse-url-at-point)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c ") 'shrink-window-horizontally)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c ") 'enlarge-window-horizontally)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c ") 'shrink-window)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c ") 'enlarge-window)

(defun-rcirc-command reconnect (arg)
     "Reconnect the server process."
     (interactive "i")
     (unless process
       (error "There's no process for this target"))
     (let* ((server (car (process-contact process)))
            (port (process-contact process :service))
            (nick (rcirc-nick process))
            channels query-buffers)
       (dolist (buf (buffer-list))
         (with-current-buffer buf
           (when (eq process (rcirc-buffer-process))
             (remove-hook 'change-major-mode-hook
                          'rcirc-change-major-mode-hook)
             (if (rcirc-channel-p rcirc-target)
                 (setq channels (cons rcirc-target channels))
               (setq query-buffers (cons buf query-buffers))))))
       (delete-process process)
       (rcirc-connect server port nick
                      nick
                      nick
                      channels)))

(ido-mode)
(windmove-default-keybindings)

(menu-bar-mode)
(tool-bar-mode)
;;; This was installed by package-install.el.
;;; This provides support for the package system and
;;; interfacing with ELPA, the package archive.
;;; Move this code earlier if you want to reference
;;; packages in your .emacs.
(when
    (load
     (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/elpa/package.el"))
  (package-initialize))

;; To install, add the following to your .emacs file:
 (autoload 'kill-ring-search "kill-ring-search"
;;  "Search the kill ring in the minibuffer."
  (interactive))
 (global-set-key "\M-\C-y" 'kill-ring-search)
;;
;; Just call kill-ring-search and enter your search.
;; M-y and C-y work as usual.  You can also use C-r like in a shell.
;; C-v, M-v, C-n and C-p will scroll the view.

;; emacs-fu
(blink-cursor-mode nil)             ;; stop cursor from blinking
(setq search-highlight t            ;; highlight when searching... 
  query-replace-highlight t)

(setq save-place-file "~/.emacs.d/saveplace") ;; keep my ~/ clean
(setq-default save-place t)                   ;; activate it for all buffers
(require 'saveplace)                          ;; get the package

(setq savehist-additional-variables    ;; also save...
  '(search-ring regexp-search-ring kill-ring)    ;; ... my search entries
  savehist-file "~/.emacs.d/savehist") ;; keep my home clean
(savehist-mode t)                      ;; do customization before activate

(push '("." . "~/.emacs.d/savefiles") backup-directory-alist) 

;; mark current line:
(global-hl-line-mode 1)
;; color for current line:
(set-face-background 'hl-line "#e0f8ff")

3.5pre5

2009-05-05T23:56:00.001-06:00

Using firefox 3.5pre5 with scribefire, twitterfox, treetabs, and ubuiquity.

And, so far, it hasn't died a horrible death. Highly recommended.

Bash and Regular expressions

2009-04-23T15:24:00.002-06:00

For those of you that didn't know, like me, Bash can and does do regexp =~ matching. A partial reference can be found Here

Zotero

2009-04-19T00:05:00.001-06:00

Oh boy, a wonderful new tool for putting together a large collection of data called Zotero.

The nice thing about this is the ability for it to a)reference your pdf's and b) be cross platform via firefox.

Link Here

Mysql hints

2009-04-17T22:18:00.001-06:00

Because i can never remember them all, and i use them once a year,

Sql hints

Twitter

2009-04-17T22:05:00.001-06:00

Hi and welcome to those of you that have clicked on my twitter link.

Before following me, a few things you should know:

Will you follow me?
I will occasionally follow back
Direct Messages?
I have been known to direct message people that follow me
Daily Posts?
Between 1 and 20 messages, some replies some original
Retweets?
Very Rarely
Topics:
Vary from personal replies to technical statements. General nerd/tech/rpg geekery.
Are you Safe for Work/Professional Tweeter?
Rare adult language, safe images, safe links. Granted I'm not a web pundit.

Mozilla Firefox memory

2009-04-17T22:02:00.001-06:00

A wonderful, and useful article on how to control some of the memory bloat on firefox can be found here:

http://internetducttape.com/2006/12/02/how-to-fix-the-firefox-memory-leak-firefox-hack/

Damned handy, and I've been running it on conkeror as well as songbird with firefox as well.

Compared to an 'unmodified' firefox we are talking a 50% reduction in memory taken so far. That's over three days for the one process and 1day for the second 'unmodified' instance.

Songbird 1.1

2009-03-16T07:39:00.001-06:00

Songbird 1.1 is up and available. Oh and it finally has support that allowed the "Now Playing" plug in to finally work again. At least so far.

Another bonus is that they have made it so that gstreamer is used on all three platforms it is offered for (OSX Linux Windows) so that's a win for the rest of us wanting to code something up with those bindings.

night

2009-02-14T02:40:00.001-07:00

Have great night. Oh and this is a test from the iPod.

heya

2009-02-11T08:25:00.001-07:00

a cell test

"Testing of white space"

2009-02-11T08:13:00.001-07:00

this is a simple test. Yeah ignore it.

body

2009-02-11T08:12:00.001-07:00

title

Sorry

2009-02-03T06:55:00.001-07:00

I know i only posted 5 things in 2008. ;;hangs head in shame;;

Picasa and Blogger?

2008-10-09T07:45:00.001-06:00

Weird, it turns out, unsuprisingly, that Picasa and Blogger are teamed together to have all my photos that I had posted to blogger in turn as a picasa album.

Interesting, not sure if I need that per se. But then again I didn't think twitter was worth a tinker's damn.

Oh boy!

2008-10-09T07:44:00.002-06:00

Updated: 4:21 am MDT on October 9, 2008
Winter Storm Watch in effect from late tonight through late Saturday night...

Gmail, again

2008-08-13T09:21:00.002-06:00

So, it appears that my gmail sendmail server is now using Thawte certificates again....

openssl s_client -connect smtp.gmail.com:465 -showcerts | tee morris

Fun times, good times.

msmtp and google

2008-07-29T15:03:00.002-06:00

So up until recently gmail was using Thawte signed certificates. Turns out that has changed and so the instructions i found on the net didn't quite work to keep sending out email.

Example on how to get it working with Thawte certs

the only thing you have to change is get the certificate for Equifax Secure Certificate Authority. I found one here at geotrust.

wget https://www.geotrust.com/resources/root_certificates/certificates/Equifax_Secure_Certificate_Authority.cer --no-check-certificate

Share files over Twitter

2008-02-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.phoreo.com/twittershare/

Looks simple, requires no additional accounts and works with your pre-existing twitter information. Only downside, Mac, Windows and Web clients only.

To Be Fair: Ubuntu warns you

2007-11-05T21:01:00.001-07:00

"""

Suspend to RAM with fglrx

Attempting to suspend to RAM using the proprietary fglrx ATI video
driver from the restricted component will hard-lock the system due to
changes in the kernel's memory allocator (which will be the default in
Linux 2.6.23) that have not been followed by ATI in a timely fashion;
this is the vendor's responsibility and is beyond our control due to
the proprietary nature of the driver. Workarounds include using Ubuntu
7.04, avoiding suspending to RAM, or using the free ATI driver. Bug #121653\

"""

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/710

What I really really really wish is that the upgrader would have went "Oh no, Bug #121653 found. Do you *really* want to continue this upgrade <N/y>"

Gutsy Gibbon, Suspend to Ram: Support More Open Source

2007-11-05T20:54:00.001-07:00

Great page on how to compile your kernel so that you too can use Gutsy and get Sleeping and Hibernation to work. http://blog.vaxius.net/?p=19

So I've been fighting Gutsy Gibbon for 4 eight-hour days. What is my fight about? Well it turns out that my laptop uses ATI drivers for it's GL graphic goodness. Gutsy comes shipped with Compiz AIGLX support, in hindsight being something more of a requirement. In any case, when one enables the proprietary (8.37.something) driver it all works brilliantly. Screensavers are fast, you can draw your gnome-terminals with flare and true compositing. It's just so dang pretty. Oh and cairo-clock pops up and wiggles.

It all goes swimmingly until you decide to sleep for the night on your laptop. Then the real fun begins. What happens, you might ask? Well the computer drops to a black screen with a blinking cursor followed by perpetual darkness. Never reaching that happy "I've suspended my operation, boss"-pulsing light that says you can pack up and go home without concern of heat damage or what have you, you are stuck watching and waiting.

Why is this? Well day 1 I thought it was just slow, so I decided to hit the power key until it turned off. Day 2, mostly the same thing. Day 3 I found out about SLUB.

What's SLUB? Well It's a neat way of doing things in the linux kernel that Gutsy, but not feisty, has. Technical, I know, but it turns out that the fglrx driver was designed to work on the old (read: feisty) version which was called SLAB. The end result is that when it is time to sleep things don't talk to each other correctly. This, in turn, means one of two things: fancy graphics or use of the open source driver.

The current open source driver "ati" on this laptop quickly showed me the reason why people make sure that important hardware is fully supported before buying into any one machine. When "ati" is coupled with the AIGLX-compiz set up, it doesn't draw fast, scrolling in firefox causes the load on the machine to go to 100% (seriously, scroll down a page, watch your CPU report you are using 100% of it), move something left or right and it's like you are back in 1999 on a video card with 4M of memory.

So, faced with this evidence I decided that, well, there had to be some forum goers that would have the exact (read: simple to give to a new user, or implement as an old one) solution. Well, the above link is as good as it gets. You either recompile your kernel to use SLAB (and lose the AIGLX fun), use the Open source driver or get graphic goodness and never be able to have sessions saved between power events.

Now why am I mentioning this? Is this just a "Ubuntu sucks" rant? No. What the real problem is that the driver from ATI is a superb piece of work, useful in all ways, but it's closed source. The bug post on launchpad for Ubuntu rates this getting fixed as a wishlist because it relies entirely on ATI going in and getting a new SLUB-enabled version posted for them to integrate into the operating system. If it had been entirely open source, someone could have taken it and recompiled it to be SLUB using (or altered the source if needed) and the release would have been flawless.

Me, I'm stuck thinking "Keep gutsy for the updated packages or blow away 3 years of ubuntu install for Debian, or install Feisty".

It's coming!

2007-10-04T10:33:00.000-06:00

on the 18th you too can have a copy of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). It stands to be put well together and it's linux.

Get a good start on lisp

2007-09-25T08:40:00.000-06:00

Go to this Common Lisp tutorial.

4th ed

2007-08-20T17:54:00.001-06:00

Jeff reports that some of the items that are in line, but might be changed for D&D 4e.

Magic is no longer Vancian. Yay! No more X spells of lvl 1. Wait, wasn't that almost a character feature of the magic system anymore? I mean I lived with this for 20 years.

No official setting as yet.

Oh hey, it might still be Open. Which is a big yay!

Thanks http://thetomeshow.com/ for good information and a fair perspective.

For when you have a hunkering and an altoid tin

2007-08-20T17:51:00.001-06:00

Awesome, thanks Make Magazine!

Find it here

Greasemonkey hot.links

2007-07-22T13:01:00.001-06:00

http://blog.persistent.info/2005/12/greasemonkey-christmas.html

Greasemonkey GMAIL loving! also don't forget to visit http://userscripts.org.

Lots of fun to be had in firefox.

ScribeFire

2007-07-22T12:59:00.001-06:00

ScribeFire is pretty dang cool. It's a plug in for Firefox that lets you post your blogs from inside the firefox browser without having to go to the control panel and clicking post new. Also allows for technorati tags. So far the only thing that didn't work right away was dragging and dropping a link from the url to the post area locked it up.

Let the fun begin.

Want a big feed of Warcraft Podcasts?

2007-07-09T21:42:00.000-06:00

This is the rss feed : here .

It has Warcraft Chronicles, The Instance, and World Of Warcast.

Love all these podcasts, and after fighting yahoo pipes for a few, I figured this would be a great way to aggregate it all together for a person.

If anyone has any other podcast feeds to add, comment or mail me. I can squeeze two more in and then I'll have to do *very little* extra to get even more in....

Update: Thanks Wowexplorer RSS FEED

D I Y

2007-07-01T18:43:00.000-06:00

Hungarian bookshelves: http://www.instructables.com/id/ELJQZB9L0YEP2863OB/

The best part is, there is now a CRAFT Magazine (which is awesome so far), a MAKE Magazine and a HACKS magazine. I'm in DIY heaven.

And you know what is the best part of the diy pages all around? The fact that it really does show that you can do this stuff. It's not like you have to be a super genius with a glue gun and a mider saw and faked your way through a project. These are things *you* can do.

Opera 9 and the Flickr Badge

2007-06-29T06:21:00.000-06:00

Sorry if you can't see the badge on the right. It *really* should have worked.

On an aside I am going to code up a jabber bot, using ruby Jabber bot. Much excitement. I've signed up a new bot account on jabber.org.

Podio

2006-12-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

Go to Podio Books. Seriously. And Get Mur's Work. She is great. And her daughter loves Dora, like my baby does. How can you really go wrong?

Flikr

2006-11-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

Put up the flickr flash badge. Much cuteness inside that account. Now back to the technicals.

Tali and Tropa

2006-11-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

For those gamers out there, how roman dice worked:

Tali and Tropa

Edit:

Sheep ankle bones, 4 sides, and various rules wackiness to follow. And apparently quite the part of culture. I guess the next thing that I should do is research how we all got to the six sided dice as something semi-standard.

Burning Empires

2006-11-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

So yeah, this wasn't as easy as I had thought itwas going to be to find:

Burning Empires

I can't wait till I get my hands on this bad boy. The wikipedia entry on Burning Wheel alone made me go "Huh? I don't get it. Grief for elves?" My interest is totally piqued.

Sons of Kryos and random musings at 5 in the morning

2006-11-21T06:15:00.000-07:00

I have no idea how I could have missed that GenCon 2006 and GenCon 2006 Indy where one and the same. Moving on, I've been thinking of going out and buying copies of Burning Empire and Burning Wheel. From the Sons of Kryos (link) I've got the impression that Burning Wheel is really fun and interesting to play in. This and Riddle of Steel are the three games on my most immediate "to get" list. My only hope is that, since these *might* be low print runs that there are still copies available.

I do have to say this, the more that I listen to more of the podcasts out there for roleplaying, the more I wonder about my own personal style. I do enjoy a good game of hack and slash, and I love the feeling of progress on a character that is levelling up. Now with that said, I haven't quite hit that spot where stories completely take over and the levelling is more of a chore or a pleasant side bonus. I do love it when there is back story to a place, but a lot of the more psychological twists and turns haven't still grabbed me. Maybe it's presentation, if there is a GM/DM/ST/whatever that could present it into a more digestible form, I'd finally "get it". Or maybe just reading Burning Wheel could lead to enlightenment.

Seriously, go listen to Sons of Kryos. They will blow your mind away, especially the episodes where they talk about tinkering with the systems you play in. The mention of tying hit points into a part of the community alone bogggled me for 10 minutes. I then thought, why not tie levels into how large of an area that you effect. I'm still working out this mechanic, because the litmus test of telling another gamer how this would work required more than 1 minute. Now the Morale Dice Pool from ... oh man 30? ... is a great idea. Also detailed in one of the podcasts.

Well, hm, the mental gastank has run empty. Be back later.

Blog This! is gone?

2006-11-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

So, I've been looking at some of the set up for beta blogger and tried to BlogThis!. Now that I've gone to beta, apparently this isn't going to happen with my old bookmarklet and I a) can't revert back b) can't hack around the bookmarklet to get it to work.

Much sadness in the House of L.

GenCon Indy 2006

2006-11-20T21:49:00.001-07:00

GenCon Indy 2006 pictures taken by someone (I think Mick) and posted to the Harping Monkey.

All I have to say is wow. I can see now, that the journey of the Misfit and the Journey of the Hero are sometimes one and the same as these people I think anyone could feel comfortable around. I.e. these are normal folks that just happen to have a love for a game or set of games. Too bad there were no pics of the Sons of Kryos, granted I am listening backwards so maybe they didn't even go.

It's like Fruitcake, but without that pesky fruit

2006-10-24T10:39:00.000-06:00

Seriously Good: Bourbon Cake

mmmm sounds yummy, and lay you flat on your back if seasoned properly.

File::Find::Rule::Extending - the mini-guide to extending File::Find::Rule - search.cpan.org

2006-09-28T15:05:00.000-06:00

A mini tutorial on how to alter file::find items. I really like the example that they give for spitting back random files. Imagine tying it into an xmms call so that you could get a random playback and then be able to save the playlist from inside xmms.

Or showing random pictures or whatever. Neat stuff.

File::Find::Rule - Alternative interface to File::Find - search.cpan.org

2006-09-28T15:03:00.000-06:00

CPAN doc listing how to use this fine module to sidestep some of the restrictions in another fine cpan module. I swear perl has some neat modules out there.

sharm - Real-time open source activity stats

2006-09-28T15:00:00.000-06:00

Follow your programmers and revision code management systems like they were baseball players. I mention this one because of the Tomboy relation....

I'm kind of liking it...

Edgy Beta CD's

2006-09-28T14:49:00.000-06:00

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta

And here you can find the cd images in case you are cursed to not have a dvd burner

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta

2006-09-28T14:47:00.000-06:00

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta

Just out today. C'mon, surf the bleeding edge. What's the worst that can happen?

Python 2.5 Release

2006-09-20T15:06:00.000-06:00

Python 2.5 Release: "This is a final release, and should be suitable for production use." Some people have said it's neat and new and works well for their applications. Some of the numpy items have supposedly broke but that very well could be a) numpy b) the person compiling it c) the platform we were trying it on.

Best of VIM Tips

2006-09-19T13:27:00.000-06:00

Go to the Best of VIM Tips, gVIM's Key Features. Then wonder why you are using any other editor. Then again, i am using emacs for my email and for editing code and washing my dog.

The main thing is that I use both all the time, and can't imagine why some people want to holy war over these editors. Of course, bike sheds do tend to obscure vision.

Geek Pit: Using Emacs to Edit Blog Posts

2006-09-15T11:49:00.000-06:00

Geek pit has this article that I'm really needing to read in full. The overall gist is that you can edit the posts you make in emacs without too much fuss.

Oh and there is a comment on how to post articles to blogger via emacs as well. Truely a very nice editor. I guess the next questions is: Is there something like this for VIM?

Vim 7.0

2006-08-25T11:32:00.000-06:00

Oh did I mention that my stable Gentoo recently went to the 7.0 version of vim?

So, it's time to start waxing poetic about random editor. Well maybe later.

Second Life

2006-08-25T11:29:00.000-06:00

Oh yeah, if you like to create coded content, you might want to check out Second Life. Tons of neat places to explore and a lot of content generated by users.

Remember that since it's all a labor of love there are going to be edges and rough spots to some folks. But what makes it's so cool is that it is the modern "folk art".

Hrm

2006-08-15T11:04:00.000-06:00

So, I have the ability to upload images to this blog. Or so I think. When I go to add a 2.9 MB bitmap it just sits and sits and sits trying upload it. It's quite odd, especially since I then get the dreaded "This Script has stopped responding" error in firefox (gentoo linux, latest stable).

Guess I'll try another browser and os and see if that works just fine or not.

New Glarus Brewing Company

2006-08-15T10:57:00.000-06:00

New Glarus Brewing Company is one of the best breweries around. I really enjoy their 'Spotted Cow' and really wish that it made it all the way out to Montana.

Very tasty and I highly recommend it. And honestly, I really think it is something that all beer drinkers can love.

Get Ready

2006-08-15T10:50:00.000-06:00

The BETA of the new blogger is coming. detailed in the prior link, it sounds like something will be a bigger improvement over the current software. Which is quite Exciting.

:Buddhistic StatuesHKe1

2006-08-14T14:42:00.000-06:00

Very Neat looking statues with a high resolution ability. They also have commons symbols in svg and png formats. All very good stuff, and very handy when you are importing media content into your life.

Vim love

2006-05-03T12:36:00.000-06:00

Now I am not a hardcore Vim fan. In fact I tend to use whatever editor I can get my hands on at the moment (which tends to be vim as vi or emacs). But this review, Linux.com | First look at Vim 7 makes me definitely think that sometimes it's going to be something that I really really want to have installed.

Imagine, you are editing a configuration file on your server and restarting services when all of a sudden you realize that you have put in the wrong options for the past two minutes. With this you can go :earlier 2m and get back to where you were. . . .

That's sweet.

Virtualization Product

2006-04-24T17:37:00.000-06:00

This Beta program is something that all OSX intel folks should get in on. It looks like very fast XP and linux on mactels and right now since it's in beta, they are giving it to you to use to give them feedback. Make it the best product you can, and it's only 40$ when it goes to the next version.

Back from the vacation

2006-04-23T15:52:00.000-06:00

And man this site fold-your-shirt.com would have been really handy to have. And it really works. Very cool.

Podcasters

2006-03-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

So, have you ever wrote a podcast asking something and never got back a reply? What are the reasons you think? I always lean towards the time or mass of emails but there are a few that I've written into and gotten an immediate response and others that I get no response ever. Odd. Comments?

inkling

2006-03-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

An idea market, inkling (link) is something that at the very least is an interesting thought experiment.

I really like the quote about "none of us is as smart as all of us". I only wish that there was a kanji picture for a logo or wallpaper that I could put on my desktop. Very cool quote.

Oh and the idea of inkling is to let groups of people predict things, such as language popularity, the idea being that a group of people can better pick out trends than just one pundit. And if you select something correctly, you get inklings, or 'idea cash' that show that you're in tune with the zeitgeist.....

CLOCC - the Common Lisp Open Code Collection

2006-03-04T19:04:00.000-07:00

CLOCC - the Common Lisp Open Code Collection (link) is self-contained lisp code that provide various functions. Including the ability to parse xml with xml.lisp. Very interesting.

Oh and the net.list includes such interesting functions as resolve-host-ipaddr ipaddr-to-dotted dotted-to-ipaddr.

Sweetness. Granted I didn't see something like UDPServer but, meh, I think it might be something trivial to write.

On further musings, maybe it's time to revist that atom blogger mode in emacs-lisp. Something about Title: and then the URL: entry point that's just bugging me. That should be simple, but maybe there is something in the code that I'm not reading correctly.

Lisp v Python

2006-03-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

On the Relationship Between Python and Lisp: compare the two. Well this is written from a python standpoint. So there is some bias. But then again, there are some salient points in the writing. Now language wars are always something of a "I can think in X, so it's cool" stripe but then again, what works for you, is the right one for you. I guess it's all a matter of tools.

And the thing is that I found this while looking for cl-xml. cl-xml *was* something that allowed a person to parse and query xml. But it was on a mac.com webpage and apparently the person that had it stopped paying mac. So it's gone. Much sadness.

DistroWatch.com: Link to get FreeBSD handbook free

2006-03-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

Distrwatch has a link to get the FreeBSD handbook.(link)

The author has released the book under the creative commons license. I really really hope it helps to extend the BSD scene in ways that some people can't expect.

Practical Common Lisp

2006-03-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

Practical Common Lisp: the book.

Yay, step 1 is done.

Is Lisp Ready to Become popular?

2006-03-01T17:33:00.000-07:00

Google Groups : comp.lang.lisp: "Is Lisp ready to become popular?"

For me there are a few things that I need for any language to become my tinker language. A good reference that's online and offline. An editor, and a windows binary and a linux binary. Oh and if it's really going to get my attention it needs a schtick. Most of the time it is something like, well, an RSS library made by some other developer. It doesn't have to be part of the language proper, just something that I can go "Hey, you know I could cook up a distributed file pushing system with these three modules".

Oh and how fast can I "Hello World" something together. You know what I'm talking about, the ability to take some STDIN read it all in, parse and manipulate and spit the changed form back out.

reddit: Night of the Living Python

2006-03-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

Reddit isn't lisp anymore. Richard Cook had mentioned this in a comment today, and well, here's the blog entry.

Much sadness, but then again, each project's language is a choice or medium of expression and sometimes it's just easier to express things for people in other languages. Granted as Paul Graham had said it was lisp, it was all I went with. Actually I'm kind of suprised that if he's involved in it that he went to the python side, as I always got the idea he was *hardcore* lisp.

Thanks for letting us know about that Richard.

Blogger: Atom API Documentation

2006-02-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

Blogger: Atom API Documentation

Too bad this atom-blog.el doesn't work for me. Guess some debug output in the background with the curl calls it's supposedly making might help me track down and debug what's wrong, but, you know, I'm not really going to keep beating my head into the wall for something like this that keeps refusing to work. Just plain silly.

Emacs

2006-02-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

Blogger Developers Network: Blogger + Emacs = Crazy Delicious: "Blogger + Emacs = Crazy Delicious"

Well supposedly this will work. Granted the defaults require xml-mode, which my cygwin doesn't have. And I'm not overly sure why. And then there is the issue of getting it to log in correctly. And it doesn't seem to work under xemacs, for some reason. Blech.

15 minutes of hack time down the tubes. I hate that.

2006-02-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

Hotlink: Planet Lisp

2006-02-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

Bill Clementson's Blog: Who is this guy?: "In the beginning, there was Planet Lisp, and life was good."

Definitely a link to something that I want to look at later. It's got various feeds and information about all sorts of things lisp-y and things that I want to learn.

Bill Clementson's Blog

2006-02-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

Bill Clementson's Blog talks about all sorts of things lisp. And he uses Emacs. Which hey, isn't that bad, despite what some people have said. I'll be using it more to do the blog posts once I get a module to do blogger from xemacs on cygwin.... :)

Remote File Editing

2006-02-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

Bill Clementson's Blog article Remote Lisp Development with SLIME/Emacs mentions "TRAMP (the remote file editing package that most people use with Emacs for accessing remote files)".

Now wouldn't this be nice for editing web pages remotely, so you can insure that you have an emacs environ that you don't have to always be tweaking on each new machine?

I'm thinking of doing something like this on the local machine, but as it is windows, it'll be a bit more trick. Granted the Make the Machine a Ubuntu box is very much still in the queue of things I'm going to do soon.

TRAMP and editing remote files

2006-02-26T10:01:00.001-07:00

Bill Clementson's Blog: Remote Lisp Development with SLIME/Emacs (link) mentioned that "TRAMP (the remote file editing package that most people use with Emacs for accessing remote files)". I am definitely thinking this would be a handy feature and something that would really make things easier for those one shot web page edits.
Granted this machine is windows that I'm posting on, so it'd be emacs for windows, but that Make my machine Ubuntu project is still very much in the queue.

shitinabox.net - FAQ

2006-02-25T22:16:00.000-07:00

shitinabox.net - FAQ: "Exactly, we care nothing of your revenge..we just want your money in exchange for helping you achieve it"

Bill Clementson's Blog: The Most Important Idea in Computer Science

2006-02-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

Bill Clementson's Blog: The Most Important Idea in Computer Science: "Lisp is the most important idea in computer science."

Remember that. And be afraid. Well, not afraid. Think about this. Lisp is it's own compiler. It's a pimp language that scares people with ()'s. And it can do darn near anything and a lot of the libraries to do it are already out there. And shoot, Reddit is written in it. And that's sweet.

Super Hero Vault

2006-02-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

Ignore the fact they were growing weed (link). It's the fact that they had this interesting set up at their home that let them almost be like super heroes. Except that they were selling drugs. That's not cool. But damn, imagine the kind of secrets other people have under their house....

Spanish language

2006-02-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

So was browsing the Creative Commons Deed link and saw a reference to Castellano. Now the one thing that I have to confess to is that I'm a language fiend. It's partly cause I'm a cryptography fiend and also an anthropology geek. Nothing is more exciting than uncovering information held in a different form, I guess. Anyways I see a reference to Castellano, and I well click on it, never having heard of this term. Turns out it that it's a formal version of Spanish. I now refer you to the excellent Wikipedia article Names given to the Spanish language.

Tekumel :: The World of the Petal Throne

2006-02-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

Tekumel :: The World of the Petal Throne Give in. Go look at it. Serious mind warping goodness and a rich world that isn't based on the European stories that a lot of the rpg's are based on.

IE no greek gods. Oh there are gods, but they are aztec-y. Yeah that prhase makes me cringe, but it's the best way to describe it. And imagine a world where no one really knows that they used to be super-high-tech world but the remnants are there. It's post holocaust, without those pesky 'day after' syndrome.

Writely - The Web Word Processor

2006-02-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

Writely - The Web Word Processor(link) sounds like something really neat. I am wondering if it uses RubyOnRails to do it's thing. In any event, I'm definitely thinking things like this are great for podcast shownotes or resumes and cover letters.

I mean imagine people being able to add to the show notes of a podcast with things like ratings for games, further explanations on tech hints and then it *might* be downloadable by the audience. I have to go check that last point.

Guardians Of Order

2006-02-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

Guardians Of Order(link) makers of such great things as "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" and publishers of "Tekumel".

Go look up Tekumel. I dare you. I have my copy, which I bought at Portland's greatest bookstore (well in my opinion), Powell's. Oh, and any city that has a technical bookstore with tons of books and another store with tons of rpg's and others is just awesome. Although, seriously Powell's, why is some of the anime in the children's section?

Tri-Stat DX

2006-02-04T20:45:00.000-07:00

"Min/Maxing and munchkinism are not problems with the game, they are problems with the player"

This is part of the *Role-Playing Game Manifesto* in the Tri-Stat DX system. And I have to say that manifesto, regardless on how cool the system is, is something that people need to read and remember. Basically the manifesto reminds people that, well it's a game and a game isn't fun if it's filled with bad cheese.

Oh and where do you get the tri-stat DX system? You can get it here. I've heard of a couple of groups dropping the system that was mentioned in a game world (like FUDGE) and using this system. Now is that because it was they knew it better or it made the world more interesting, I don't know. But it at least means that the system worked for someone.

Podcast Alley

2006-02-04T20:41:00.000-07:00

At Podcast Alley (link) they list all sorts of podcasts. First thought, do they use Ruby or Ruby on rails? Second thought, why aren't some of my fave podcasts higher on their ranks? :)

Anyways, it's a really nice site, and really nice to find various podcasts and see where your's is in the ranks.

Go there. Go there now.

Podcast Geeking

2006-02-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

So I love listening to podcasts (link). I have several favourites and I'll be posting some of them and their pages in the near future. All of them are great to listen to and chock full of information that I really appreciate.

I have to say that a lot of the time that the podcasts that I tend to continue to listen to are ones that do the following:

Have good audio
Have Emotionally Stable people
Admit that they aren't the be-all end-all to their topic

The last one is a major reason that I keep up with a particular podcast. Otherwise I think that they are being selfish over their title and think that only they can do the job well and the rest of us suck. Thankfully, most of the podcasters out there still haven't fallen into that trap.

Small Batch Craft-Roasted Coffee from Sweet Maria's!

2006-02-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

Small Batch Craft-Roasted Coffee from Sweet Maria's and how to subscribe to their service. I got this from CoffeeGeek who's site is the best darned resource for coffee in general. Granted a how to make ristretto link isn't easy to find (for me).

Xandros

2006-01-28T23:45:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here blogging and I was noticing that when I did a search for Ubuntu that under the google sponsored links there was a Ubuntu vs Xandros link. I clicked on it and was sent to the Xandros web site.

Ok, maybe I'm dumb but they are both debian distros. And Xandros is pay only. Now if that is wrong and there is a live-cd for me to play with I'm all for trying it out. The only thing I hate about some of the distros for linux out there right now is that they are pay-for only (more or less). I mean what's the point of leaving one paid-for operating system to go to another. Now don't get my wrong, a lot of the distros like suse xandros or redhat are great for those people that want tech support or at the very least someone to blame when something breaks.

But that's not me. I use things like BSD's and other Unix systems cause I want control of my experience, I want it cheap, and I want neat new tech that is sometimes really niche. If anyone has a better overview of Xandros I'd love to hear it.

Ruminations on Linux

2006-01-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

So, something I've been thinking of doing is installing ubuntu on my computer on the alternate hard drive partition. I've already done so on the laptop, and well I rarely now go into the windows paritions. The only things that I don't know will work in Ubuntu (I can hazard guesses but eh)

*iTunes music, specifically the aac's on the drive, if they even exist
*the podcasts on the ntfs partitions
*network set up might be slightly painful if this network card isn't recognized

All kind of slight reasons to not use Linux. I could do things like set up a webserver on the box and let people know the site or set up jabber servers and other messaging elements. Those are serious draws. And I know the sound will work, since this is an AC97 sound card. Hm.... Guess I could always slot a live-cd and see what shows up and what doesn't. The choices abound. Oh and would X work on this ati radeon 9800....

Mutt with Gmail

2006-01-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

This blog article talks about how to use mutt with gmail. Very handy to have. My would someone use mutt when they could go over to the gmail web interface? Well sometimes you aren't at a web browser, or with me, I want to be able to customize various aspects of the reply that I don't have in the web client.

For example, mutt lets you do things like have multiple identities when you are replying to things, sometimes you can have mulitple signatures and some other features.

And heck, I really like mutt.

NetBSD's CGD

2006-01-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

Tasty crypto information follows. One of my favourite things mentioned: n-stage crypto keys. So you could have some wacky things like a network key, a disk based key, a password, and another key on a crypto partition that only opens up at certain times.

Keey your stuff secret if you want, but the really nice thing is that you could do this on a laptop and have it so that if the laptop is stolen, all that critical credit card information and pictures of your spouse aren't usable by *anyone*. Also, would kind of eliminate what happened on the National Lampoon's European Vacation, with the video camera..... hint hint.