Emacs is almost infinately customisable; a fact I didn't really get to grips with this fact untill I found myself on a Fedora Core box a while back with a net connection but without my favourite set of keyboard short cuts. This really brought home how just a few simple customisations can come to be relied upon.
Determined never to be caught short in such a manner again I decided to make my .emacs permanently available, providing I have a net connection that is.
After running with Fire as my primary IM app for the best part of a year, its finally been usurped by Adium. After running the two in parallel I found I liked the cleaner interface of Adium over that of Fire. I'd tried Adium in the past and found I couldn't take an app with a cute little duck as a mascot seriously, but Adium just seems more polished than Fire and seems to be vastly more customisable.
We've had a cactus plant sitting on our kitchen window-sill for the last three or so years; it hasn't done much apart from growing a bit occasionally. But after so much inactivity our unassuming cactus has decided to produce not one but three spectacular flowers. Based on past inactivity we probably won't see anymore for a few more years so a photo seemed to be in order. Sunday was a slow day.
I've swapped themes, at least for the time being, to the very customisable, visually gorgeous and almost perfect Regulus theme, written by Ben Gillbanks at Binary Moon.
Almost perfect? Well it does cause the W3C validator to barf slightly on the sidebar. No worry though, a small hack to sidebar.php and all was well again. The diff is available for those who are interested in this sort of thing.
I've just downloaded and installed the latest update for OS X via the Software Update utility. The update requires a system restart which isn't unexpected. What was unexpected was the second restart in the middle of the reboot sequence.
After my heart resumed something approaching its' normal rate I did what I should have done in the first place and read the update documentation. If I'd done this I should have spotted the key phrase:
With the Mac OS X 10.4.6 system software update, PowerPC-based Macs will restart twice, instead of once, after the initial installation.
No explanation as to why this was neccessary though.
This was also spotted, with similar cardiac effects, by todays edition of The Register.
You're working in Outlook, minding your own business and someone sends you a meeting request; you check your schedule, you're free at the given date and time so you click on Accept only to see this:
Restarting Outlook doesn't help, nor does rebooting your machine; you've fallen victim to a corrupted forms cache. But don't fret, there's a straightforward, if not entirely intuitive, way of clearing the cache.
Standard disclaimer: YYMV, this worked for me, using Outlook 2003 on XP Professional Service Pack 2, it might work for you, it might not.
Although this is free advertising, before you use SSH for anything other than a drop in replacement for telnet buy a copy of O'Reilly's SSH: The Definitive Guide, and then read it. It's a rare O'Reilly book which doesn't make you realise just how little you actually know about a subject and this one is no exception. To be honest, it was only after reading this book that I realised just why I shouldn't use SSH as a drop in replacement for telnet, which in turn proved how little I knew about SSH. Which kind of proves my point I guess.
I get spam email; so does everyone I know with an email address. My mail client of choice is currently Apple's Mail.app and this includes a Bayesian junk mail filtering system which, after a bit of training, is very effective.
First there was the paperless office which was going to free us from the drudgery of sheets of paper. That was first mooted as an idea in 1975 and my desk is still covered in the stuff. Hmm.
Then there was wifi which was going to liberate us from wires and turn us all into wireless road warriors. A quick rummage through the contents of the laptop bag I carry with me each day does tend to disprove that idea somewhat.
A while back when I was using Blosxom to power my blog I wrote a plugin called sticky which forced given articles to appear as the most recent.
When I changed my blog over to WordPress the plugin got temporarily misplaced. The plugin is still referenced online at the Unofficial Blosxom User Group plugin registry so now it's back and can be downloaded again. It's better to give than receive apparently.
