FOB

With emacs 22, apparently someone got the idea that it would be a good idea to drop you into a splash screen rather than your edit buffer when you say "emacs -nw filename". Sending an edit command, such as control-L to refresh the screen, shows you the buffer you wanted to edit. Good plan.

Anyway, I finally found the right Google search, and found out how to turn this behavior off. "(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)" in your .emacs will kill the splash screen off altogether. (Nice inverted variable sense, by the way.) If you just want it when you're not editing a file, it gets more complicated, and I haven't figured out a good plan. See this discussion for details. Note, however, that files seem to get opened after the .emacs is run, which invalidates the technique that discussion suggests.

So, a friend's project tried to blind me today with a hideous "random color" for a large area of text. The quotation marks are because it's hard to say what a "random color" even means. For most purposes, it means a color that is chosen solely as a label, and that therefore can be anywhere in the color palette. The usual constraint is that a set of labels need to be chosen, and so successive random colors should be easily distinguished…

I always forget to take notes when I do a Drupal upgrade. This blog entry will be my notes for this upgrade of my home boxes. I will use it in turn to upgrade FOB, and then hopefully use it again when it's time to upgrade again in the future…

A while back I commented that I might switch to It's All Text for writing my blog posts. I really like having access to full GNU emacs features and its reliability for editing text. It's All Text (IAT) is an Iceweasel plugin that promised to give me that by actually allowing me to invoke emacs directly on a text box in my browser.

I'm idiosyncratic, though; I don't like to use the X interfaces to GNU emacs or even Lucid emacs. I want my emacs to run in a terminal window. And not just any terminal window—even though I run KDE, gnome-terminal has the best Unicode handling of any terminal I've tried, so I use it instead. Turns out that IAT can do the right thing with a little shell scripting help. Here's how I did it…

Ikiwiki is a nice wiki and a nice idea. Git (with its friend Cogito) is a nice source code management system. However, after spending many, many hours trying to figure out how to get them to work right together, it took Jamey coaching me to finally get the combination going. Since this seems to be due to the combination of a bizarre model with a strong insufficiency of documentation, I thought I should leave a record here…