How I Some Times Fail

From: keramida
Subject: Patience with Windows users, or “How I some times fail”
References: http://blog.postmaster.gr/2006/09/22/onewebday-2/, http://blog.postmaster.gr/2008/09/22/onewebday-3/

Adamo mentioned in passing, while writing about this year’s OneWeb day, that he really dislikes being asked to “fix” Word.

My involvement with computers started some time in late 1993, and I have been in the same place far too many times. The overwhelming majority of acquaintances and members of my wider family don’t really understand what “I am trying to work as a computer programmer” means. They also assume that if you “work with computers” you are, by definition, the best person to ask about Microsoft® Word™ or about that little flashy MSN emoticon set they are trying to install on Microsoft Windows.

Scripting Mercurial

Dan Fuchs posted a short article about scripting Mercurial to see what files an incoming changeset modifies.

I am always amazed at how easy Mercurial (and other free software tools) make this sort of thing.

Moving a FreeBSD Installation to a New Laptop

Some time ago, I wrote in “One of the reasons why X11 rocks” that I had to move my FreeBSD installation from my dying Toshiba Satellite U-220 laptop to a new laptop, one that I bought in a pretty short notice from Plaisio Computers. This article is, as I promised back then, a description of how I migrated my old laptop files to the new system.

There are people who actually “have a life” out there

Very touching

Mercurial command demo: hg verify

One of the wonderful commands that Mercurial support is the “verify” command. Running this command in a Mercurial workspace goes through the backing store of the repository and makes sure that the history and contents of the versioned files are not corrupt, missing or otherwise in a “bad” state.

An example of how you can use this Mercurial command is described here.

Lisp fun; can it run faster than C?

A common misconception about Lisp is that it is “slow”. I wrote misconception because this is not necessarily true. Most of the time that the “slowness” argument is brought up, it eventually turns out, after talking a while with the supporter of the argument, that it is either based on hearsay or that it stems from older experience with short tests.

Weekend updates to the Emacs ports

This weekend the GNU Emacs team released version 22.3.

doc-el gets commit email notifications

We have enabled commit email in the main freebsd/doc-el repository as of today :-)

A bunch of updates for the Greek FreeBSD/doc translations

Translations of technical documentation from English to Greek are a relatively difficult task. It takes a certain level of attention to detail and a fairly good command of both languages. Then there is the minor issue of keeping the translations up to date with their English counterparts.