Blog - Everything

I'm going to stop using PGP signatures in email messages that I send. While it can be satisfying to sign off on every email by entering a PGP passphrase, it is just not worth the effort anymore. Not enough other people use them, and many of those who don't use them get confused when they receive these messages, due to their email clients sucking.

I think that the next big thing in GUI apps should be the ability to take the exact contents of a window and send them to a remote machine. The use case for this is: you start an app at home, go to work, ssh (with X forwarding) into your home machine, and realize that you need to use that app again. Normally you'd kill the app and restart it. But what if you could just "clone" the window so that it appeared on your work machine, responsive to new input? I'd love to see functionality like this being added at the toolkit level (i.e. GTK, Qt) so that application developers would not have to do any work to activate it.

One of the nice things about running many apps in Emacs is that I already have that ability. I can just use the multi-tty support in Emacs 23 to open up either a terminal window or a new GTK frame, and then switch to the buffer that contains the app.

I have a keyboard with a suspend button. I also have a desktop which I'd like to remain on all of the time, despite accidental presses of this button. Here is how I protect myself from the fumble-finger freeze.

• Run gnome-power-preferences &.
• Open the "General" tab.
• For the "When the suspend button is pressed" option, choose "Do nothing".

For a while I thought that this event was managed by acpid, but in fact it is managed by HAL, hence the need to change it via gnome-power-preferences.

I watched the Org-Mode Google Tech Talk video recently. It helped me to understand more of what Org-Mode was about. I thought I'd share some likes and dislikes concerning Org-Mode.

Like:

• Different agenda views. Very nicely done.
• Folding the entire structure of the document to make a "Table of Contents" of sorts.
• Colorized "TODO"/"DONE"/"WAITING" keywords.
• Generating an HTML table from an Org table that is embedded in a comment.
• Auto-realigning tables after hitting TAB.

Dislike:

• Meta+(left arrow, right arrow) key bindings. I use this all the time for navigating around documents in modes other than Org, and it annoys me that Org mode uses this to manipulate heading levels. This is easy enough to work around, with a few well-placed define-key statements.
• Focus on tables. Now that I'm out of college, I have no use for tabular data. Then again, the taylor + Calc example in the video was amazing.

Open questions:

• How does Org Mode deal with some text at the left margin which follows a heading? Does it get folded with the heading? I don't want to have to indent text just to get it folded.

I came across a most excellent anime series recently: Spice and Wolf. The main character is a laid-back and calculating trader, and the his companion is a cunning, mischievous, yet fierce wolf goddess. The back-and-forth between them is enjoyable. The plot mostly concerns the trading ventures of the main character, and the distractions to the guy's normal routine due to his new traveling companion. The music fits very well, and reminds me a little of Haibane Renmei. It has been a while since I've liked opening and closing themes for an anime this much. I am very much looking forward to picking this one up when it becomes available for US distribution.

I just got back from Anime Expo 2008. Great experience.

I took the metro rail line from Universal City Station to Central Station on 7th Street, and then to Pico Blvd. From there it was a short walk to the conference. As I got off at Pico at 9am, I noticed quite a few cosplayers, and walked with them to the conference site. Taking the metro line brought to mind the Genshiken manga and anime series, and how the characters would always take the rail line to Comiket.

The cosplayers were amazing, as expected. Some highlights were a group of Sonic characters, a guy giving Mario a "tough-guy" image, many many cute Asian-American girls (most with male escorts), a guy with an exclamation point over his head, a girl dressed as Midna from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a few characters from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney yelling "Objection!", several girls with Tetris block costumes, Chouji from Naruto, Sakura from Naruto, a Transformer character, and some girls with parasols.

The line for picking up badges was very short, thanks to pre-registering online. I just had to print the email confirmation at home, bring it in, and scan the bar code. Definitely an improvement over the system at ACEN.

To start off, I went to the viewing rooms and took in some anime. I had been wanting to see The Third for a while, so I made sure to catch a few episodes. I liked the opening song. The anime had some humorous moments, which were appreciated by the crowd. The plot wasn't quite for me, though: a 14-year old tomboy beating up on mecha using PSP, with a bishounen love interest. After that, I watched a late-season episode of Wolf's Rain. I still don't quite understand the plot of that series. The episode had some sort of epic showdown involving a paradise.

I had some sort of a Thai salad for lunch on-site. The dining area was a bit crowded, and I ended up sitting across from a Korean-American manga-ka (manga author) named Jinsoo Terry. She was there to exhibit her new series Palbot: Come to America. She told me where her booth was, but alas, I was looking in the wrong place for it, and ended up missing it. Nonetheless, it was nice just to meet her.

I wore my "Eye"-R-C Chart T-shirt to the con, and that proved an excellent choice. I received at least 4 compliments on it, and two of those were not even while at the conference site. I had bought that shirt last year at ACEN 2007, so I made another T-shirt purchase this year. This one had a front which reads "Robert A. Heinlein for President: More Life Than Any Other Candidate ... and Better Ideas."

After lunch, I went to the exhibit hall and checked out every single vendor (including the artist alley), which took at least an hour. I ended up buying a Trigun poster, the aforementioned Heinlein shirt, and an artist drawing of several heroines from the Naruto anime series — I must admit a fondness for Hinata from that series :^) . I also noticed a towel with Kyoko Otonashi from Maison Ikkoku for sale, as well as some body pillows with the character Haruhi from The Melancholy of Suzimiya Haruhi. Tempting, but I have my limits.

I noticed that they claimed to have a "manga cafe" near the viewing rooms, so I thought I would see what that was like. Basically, it was just a room with several tables, a couple vending machines with drinks, and a lot of manga available for reading on shelves. We were required to leave our badges and belongings at the front desk, presumably to discourage theft. I spent a good hour and a half there, making it through volume one of the Nausicaä manga, and about half of the first volume of To Terra.

By 3:30pm, I was a bit tired, and no interesting anime series were being shown in the viewing rooms, so I decided to call it a day. This was the first time I had done a solo trip to an anime convention, and it proved to be an enjoyable time.

Lauri Lebo's book The Devil in Dover is a moving account of the 2005 "Intelligent Design" trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. The author does an excellent job of fusing the real stories of many participants in this debacle into a comprehensible timeline. She writes in a way that makes for an enjoyable, diverse, and moving read, preserving the human element of the tale. I recommend it.