Weblog: Sep 2002

The digicam CCD has bad pixel or spot of bad pixels. Brilliant glowing magenta dot in tonight's fog photos. Seems to be in most photos since at least the beginning of 2002, though not as noticeable as Friday night's.

Ted Rall, War Cry

Bell Labs Fires Researcher for Fraud

On second thought, our .login doesn't need to leave the login shell or startx processes waiting around (so long as we take care of xauth elsewhere):

if ("$tty" == "tty1") then
  echo "Starting X..."
  exec xinit -- -deferglyphs all -nolisten tcp vt7
endif

And you wondered what kind of person was involved with that marketing:

While Gates and Allen toiled away at their fledgling company, Ballmer honed his marketing skills at Procter & Gamble, where he helped sell Duncan Hines's Moist & Easy product line.

—NYT book review

Released Quack version 0.13 first thing this morning. We won't say anything about the bug in 0.12 released late last night.

Found latest GDM was taking up 4MB of VM while I was logged in on the 48MB RAM laptop, which is enough of a difference to push into battery-killing swap. Uninstalled GDM, switched back to getty login. Boot time to login prompt is faster now too. ~/.login file starts X when I log in on the first virtual console:

if ("$tty" == "tty1") then
  echo "Starting X..."
  startx
  if ($status == 0) then
    clear
    logout
  endif
endif

Guile 1.6 finally shipped, on September 6th. Once it's in Debian Sid, I'll take a stab at quack-find-file support.

Released Quack version 0.11. Not sure what I was thinking, but I broke FSF Emacs 20 support in the process of better supporting the reviled XEmacs.

Washington Post article this morning, "In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue," has a bunch of great bits.

Released Quack version 0.10. quack-view-srfi now prompts with titles (courtesy of SRFI indexes that Quack grabs off the Web and caches), and defaults to the SRFI referenced at point. quack-tidy-buffer command fixes all your whitespace. Couple other small improvements.

This being Cambridge, the message of today's flag photo was likely intentional.

I like to think that the effort of the people who work the falafel food truck at lunchtime eventually pays off for them.

Released Quack version 0.9. XEmacs 21 compatibility and several new features. Late last night, finally banged out an Emacs command that toggles a define between the two syntaxes, which I wished I had every time I needed to insert a let or letrec:

(define (my-func x y)    <==>    (define my-func 
  (+ x y 42))                      (lambda (x y) 
                                     (+ x y 42)))

Quack has gotten worked on during scattered breaks from housing hassle, when I have an hour here or there on the laptop. Majority of my time now will be spent using Quack for real work.