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Good morning.

rudi — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 14:59:48 +0000

You looking at me?

rudi — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:36:26 +0000

AppleScript ScriptingAdditions not running under Snow Leopard?

rudi — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:26:17 +0000

Hi Googler! If your newly-downloaded scripting addition seems to be in the right place but your AppleScript script doesn’t recognize it, make the AppleScript Editor run in 32-bit mode (Get Info on the icon, check “Open in 32-bit mode” in the “General” section).

rudi — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:54:19 +0000

When I sit down to write something (these days, usually a paper or part of the thesis), I usually have a pretty clear picture of the flow of arguments, the overall structure and also have some key sentences ready. This is because I got in the habit of explaining stuff that interests me to an imaginary, sympathetic listener, an intelligent, curious guy who doesn’t know anything about the specifics of what I am busying myself thinking about.

If that imaginary guy becomes confused by my explanation, I know I don’t have a clear picture of what I want to say myself, and writing it down is premature.
And if the listener becomes bored, I know I have a problem … Chances are I am bored by the subject as well, and will make anything to become excited again. This usually means procastinating until deadlines become so tight that writing down boring stuff is exciting by itself because of the feeling of working “without a net”.

VirtualBox 3.0 hangs with Linux guest :(

rudi — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:36:46 +0000

I installed VirtualBox 3.0 (on an OS X host) but got frequent hangs of the Ubuntu Linux client VM (Windows XP seemed to work fine). Going back to VirtualBox 2.4.4 lets me continue working.
I didn’t need the 3D acceleration anyway …

On Line Wrapping in Emacs 23(pre)

rudi — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:06:13 +0000

Emacs, my editor of choice, is currently in pre-test; the next version, 23, will feature unicode, anti-aliased fonts and many other goodies. Â It will also feature soft (visual) line wrapping and the attendant redefinition of next-line and previous-line commands for moving by lines-as-seen-on-screen instead of lines-as-contained-in-the-file. Â This is very good for text modes and proportional fonts, but breaks programming modes, editing tabular data and keyboard macros.

Normally, functionality like this is implemented as a minor mode (viz. show-paren-mode, transient-mark-mode, font-lock, …), but cursor movement by visual line is a global setting instead, causing no end of discussions on the emacs mailing list. Â The maintainers’ current stance seems to be “we’re in pre-test, so can only accept bug fixes for regressions from emacs 22, and this was already discussed 6 months ago.”

Luckily, emacs is quite customizable, so I implemented the behavior I want: visual line mode (soft word-wrapped lines) and visual line movement (cursor moves down one visual line instead of one text-file line) for text modes, and the normal behavior in all other modes.

(setq line-move-visual nil)
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-visual-line-mode)
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook
          (lambda () (set (make-local-variable 'line-move-visual) t)))

Unbreak the Eee S101 keyboard

rudi — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:00:33 +0000

The Eee S101 (and other netbooks^Wsmall laptops of that lineage) have as one of their distinguishing features a right-shift key that lies beyond the cursor-up key, thereby making the machine unusable for touch-typists.

Here is an adapted script from linuxquestions.org that just exchanges the right shift key and the cursor-up key:

#!/bin/sh

# set up keyboard to exchange the Shift and Up keys, and the Down and Right keys
xmodmap -e "keycode 62 = Up" # Shift => Up
xmodmap -e "keycode 109 = Prior" # Shift-shift => PgUp
xmodmap -e "keycode 111 = Shift_R" # Up => Shift
xmodmap -e "keycode 112 = Control_R" # PgUp => Shift-shift
xmodmap -e "add shift = Shift_R" # Make the new Shift key actually do shifting
xset r 62 # Make the new Up key autorepeat
xset r 109 # Make the new PgUp autorepeat
xset -r 111 # Prevent the new Shift key from autorepeating

I did not manage to get Fn-Shift_R working as a PgUp key (xev reports the same keycode for Fn-Shift_R and Shift_R) so left the xmodmap / xset lines in as a reminder to investigate further.

Emacs switcheroo

rudi — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:11:03 +0000

I realized that I had customized Aquamacs to the point where it was behaving just like standard emacs, except when it wasn’t (“Ok, M-q to reindent, then … gnah, it quit again!”), so I switched to a normal Carbon Emacs build. So far I’m happy and not missing anything.

Some days, I hate the internet

rudi — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:52:50 +0000

I’m currently being joe-jobbed, that is, some spammer forges mail from my email address. Â This means the “delivery failed” mails from various mailer demons come in at a rate of about 3 per minute. Â I hope no one thinks I’m reallyÂ ”eLvitra Vigara”,Â ”beauregard hiroki” orÂ ”issiah monty” sending out these spam mails.Â Similarly, I’m still listed as a “suspected attack site” by google; don’t know when they’ll get around to re-checking my status. Â This is just no fun.

Another public service announcement

rudi — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:00:25 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, update your Wordpresses!I just got a nice mail from google telling me that this here blog was spreading malware. Â I updated to the latest WordPress release and weeded out an iframe and a noscript. Â Hope no one was infected because of me…Â