Monthly Archives: March 2009

The One True Editor

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Emacs is exactly like a religion. A western religion, at least, operates by testing the faith of its participants. The god coldly allows babies to die of unexplained illnesses, violence to affect the innocent, wars to break out, natural disasters to ruin everything. That we mortals have faith that this is a loving and intelligent, all knowing god causes us to question reality itself, our selves, our church or temple, and our religious leaders. But this questioning followed by resolve, strengthens character. Or, ruins character. It could really go either way, which is why so many object to religious pursuits.

But in Emacs we find a solution.
Continue reading The One True Editor →

Yet Another Moon Found

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… hiding in a Ring of Saturn.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn’s G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc.

Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over the course of about 600 days found the tiny moonlet, half a kilometer (about a third of a mile) across, embedded within a partial ring, or ring arc, previously found by Cassini in Saturn’s tenuous G ring.

The finding is being announced today in an International Astronomical Union circular.

You can see the moon as a bright dot in three different locations in the arc of a planetary ring in this photo:

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See an uncropped version of this photo here and here, and more information here.

Give Some Money to Al Franken!!!!!!

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Seriously! The Franken team is now entering the ‘defense’ phase of the absurd Election Challenge launched by Norman Coleman, who lost the election for Senate to Al Franken but who refuses to give up his seat.

If everybody who reads this blog sends five dollars to Al, they’ll have enough to … well, to make some photocopies or something. But every little bit helps!!!!!!!

Rumors are, as you know, that the Coleman Campaign is out fund raising. We’ve got to help Al.

Coleman rests, pays fine, asks Judges to overturn election.

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Norm Coleman had to pay a $7,500 fine yesterday for failure to disclose important evidence in the 26 day long Franken-Coleman Senatorial Election Challenge Trial. The plaintiff, Coleman, also claimed in a written statement to the court that since the number of illegal votes cast in this election exceeds the narrow margin of difference between the two candidates (which has Franken as the winner), the election needs to be set aside. However, Coleman has failed to show that any votes were actually cast illegally, or to make any compelling legal argument that this extraordinary request be honored.

The judges indicated to Coleman that additional fines would be charged if his shenanigans continue. They also indicated that “In the event this sanction fails to deter future conduct on the part of [Coleman’s] counsel, the court will not hesitate to impose harsher sanctions, up to and including dismissal [of the case].”

The essence of the unethical behavior by Coleman: Republican election judge Pam Howell had been on the sand a couple of times last week, but was pulled off the stand as the result of documents she secretly passed to the Coleman lawyers. The crux of her testimony seemed to be unverified hearsay about a Souh Minneapolis (= Democratic) election judge stuffing a ballot box. But the Coleman camp and Republican Howell also seem to have bee in cahoots, and worked out the exposure of evidence that seemed to (ineffectively) support Coleman’s claim, but the suppression of evidence having the contrary effect.
Continue reading Coleman rests, pays fine, asks Judges to overturn election. →

Lenovo Dual Screen Laptop

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The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is a rather unique product, targeted squarely at mobile professionals who require the power, features, and performance of workstation-class machine on the go. We previously evaluated the standard ThinkPad W700 and praised the system for its performance and stand-out integrated features, like a Wacom Digitizer Tablet and X-Rite Color Calibrator. The ThinkPad W700ds takes all of the features offered by the W700 and ads a secondary, slide-out display, which increases monitor real-estate by 39%.

Gigs of everything too. Linux plays well with Lenovo laptops, even if Lenovo (as a company) does not always play well with Linux.

Duck! 2009 DD45 is flying by

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Late word out of the IAU’s Minor Planet Center: a small asteroid will pass close to Earth [on] …March 2nd … at 13:44 Universal Time. How close? The MPC’s Timothy Spahr calculates that it’ll be 0.00047 astronomical unit from Earth’s center. That’s only about 40,000 miles (63,500 km) up — well inside the Moon’s orbit and roughly twice the altitude of most communications satellites!

This object is about 30 meters across. If it struck a dinosaur, it would probably kill it. But, unlike this object that struck the earth recently, this asteroid is going to fly by.

Apparently, people in Tahiti will have/had a close enough look to read the serial numbers.

Details here.

The Banking Crisis…

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… explained.

I heard the first 50 minutes or so of a one hour edition of This American Life dedicated to explaining the banking crisis in terms that can be understood by any reasonable smart (or even not so smart) person. The bottom line: Nationalize the banks, then re-privatize them as soon as possible. One expert said it this way: If you covered up the name of the country involved and showed the numbers to any World Bank operative, they would all say the same thing. Nationalize the banks right now, then re-privatize them as soon as you can. And round up the head bankers and put them on a hay cart. (I may have added the part about the hay cart.)

You should be able to get to a podcast of the show here.

Technology Today

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Should OpenOffice.org (OOo) writer (the text editor unit of the OpenSource office suite) have the horizontal ruler, on the top of the page, visible by default, or should it be hidden by default? This is the argument that it should be hidden by default. If you become a registered user of the OOo web site, you can actually vote on this. Let me know how that goes.

Xfce 4.6 is released (yesterday). Xfce is a gnome-ish desktop for Linux that uses very few resources (and has very few bells and whistles). “Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new sound mixer, and several huge improvements to the session manager and the rest of Xfce’s core components.” Details here. Personally, I’m thinking about setting up an install that uses emacs as the ‘desktop.’ I’ve got an old laptop that I might try that with. I would have the simplest possible windows manager to run a web browser and do everything else in emacs. This would be for writing in coffee shops and similar locals. That would be cool. I would name the computer “Ivan.”

But even with emacs running the interface, one might want to use vim now and then. and since everything is running on the command line one would want to use regular expressions all the time. So I’ll be wanting to read about Using regular expressions in Vim

According to reports, OpenOffice 3.1 is blindingly fast, and it has some interesting new features and important bug fixes. It won’t ever be as good as my fantasy emacs system, but for a gui-office it is pretty impressive. Here’s and early look.

Qimo is Linux for kids.