Blog - /Tech

I sent out 4 communications to the outside world today that have found their way into the various mediums that computer enthusiasts (mostly Emacs ones) utilize. Four of them were responded to, and one has not yet been responded to, but it was a response to a response. The types of response have been interesting to me.

The first was a newsgroup posting in answer to a question someone had about the keystroke used to delete IMAP folders. I have not actually done this myself, so I leafed through the documentation and suggested the use of `G delete'. Within a half hour, I had two responses saying that this is incorrent and I should have said `C-u G delete'. sigh, OK, you're right.

The next was an email to the debian laptop users mailing list in response to a question someone had about whether ext2 was a good filesystem choice. I suggested that this person use a journalled file system like ext3 or reiserfs so that they would not be as likely to use data if the power went out or (however unlikely with GNU/Linux) the system crashed. I got at least two responses saying "blah blah blah who needs a journalled file system, ext2 is fine for me, ext3 runs slower than ext2 ..." It was not worth replying to this kind of drivel. One person said that reiserfs might be a good choice, which made me believe there were some on the list who weren't complete mavericks.

Then I volunteer to maintain Emacs Wiki: Emacs Wiki Mode, since I had some fun new ideas for it and a bit of free time. Within an hour of sending it out, the maintainer of Emacs Wiki: Muse Mode said, "Why would you want to make Emacs Wiki more like Muse? Muse is a superset and a lot better and waxes your car for you. (The last part was made up just for dramatic effect.)" So I fought the urge to flame him about the lack of documentation on transitioning to Muse (which kept me from using it in the first place), and took another look at the Muse distribution. I must admit, the code looked nice and clean and the journal mode which I had recently starting using existed there. So I simply sent a nice message to the effect of, "I figured that adding some Muse functionality to Emacs Wiki would make it easier for users to make the transition." No flames back on that yet. That takes care of communications 3 and 4.

I just now checked my mail and found that Emacs Wiki: Sacha Chua has accepted my maintenance proposal, so I am now the official maintainer. Yay! Cue the wild changing of header files to bear my mark. All right, I have not done that yet. ;^)

So in conclusion, some people who communicate online can be quite annoying if they want to be. Especially when you are in a somewhat bad mood. So bad that everything my roommate does today gets on my nerves. So bad that I watch as much animé as I can cram in to the day and still get work done. Now that the day is done for me, I am off to bed so that my poor sleep-deprived noise-sensitive roommate can get some sleep. /me wishes once again that this room had a separate bedroom and living room area.

Ah, one more thing. I am trying out thttpd instead of Apache for hosting files on my laptop. It allows me to make nicer local links, and separate traffic from the outside world from some of my local services, like documentation. It is nice knowing that there is a main server out there that can take care of my laborious web-serving needs so that I can lighten the load on my laptop. In particular, it is nice to know that I am probably freeing up an average of 128 MB of RAM now that I have uninstalled Apache. That is equal to half of my installed memory.