<p>The default setup for the <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> DVCS on Windows with <a href="http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/">tortoisehg</a> uses <a href="http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.63/htmldoc/Chapter7.html#plink">plink</a> and <a href="http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.63/htmldoc/Chapter9.html#pageant">Pageant</a> to manage SSH keys when you are using ssh as the transport protocol for mercurial. That’s most likely the right choice for a normal Windows…

<p><em>Another slightly edited post from my old C++ blog. Again, you may have seen this one before.</em></p>

<p>… I’ll just point them to <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/10/grumpy-people-get-the-details-right.html?mid=facebook_nymag">this article</a> and explain that I’m just sweating the details. If you’re a programmer, that is a lot more important than most people and most programmers would believe.</p>

<p><em>This post first appeared on my old C++ blog. You might have seen it before.</em></p>

<p>I’ve been using the official GNU distribution of <a href="http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/">Emacs for Windows</a> for the last few years and am very happy with it. Well, <em>usually</em> I am very happy with it until someone sends me a 25GB log file I need to analyse and the 32 bit Emacs refuses to play when faced with the enormity of the file in question.</p>

<p><a href="http://melpa.org/">MELPA</a> has recently got its own domain (<a href="http://melpa.org/">melpa.org</a>) so it’s time to update your list of package repositories with the new URL.</p>

<p>For those who aren’t aware of this yet, there is an <a href="http://emacs.stackexchange.com/">Emacs Stackexchange</a> site that’s currently in beta. I’d like to encourage everybody to take part in it so it can become a viable site on the Stack Exchange network.</p>

<p>Announcement on the <a href="http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-10/msg00626.html">emacs-devel</a> list. Fingers crossed that 24.4. will be out in a few days as mentioned.</p>

<p>We have an early 2008 MacBook “Blackbook” that is still working perfectly well and does everything we ask from it. It’s one of the reasons I love Apple hardware - it’s well engineered and works without a major fuss. Obviously we’re not playing games on it but it’s perfect for us to use for tasks that need a bit more power or typing than you’d want to do on a tablet. It’s also perfect for doing tasks that I want to use a separate computer for,…

<p>If you haven’t heard about the bash “shellshock” bug yet, it may be time to peek out from underneath the rock you’ve been under ;). While bash isn’t installed as standard on FreeBSD, there’s a very good chance that someone either installed it because it’s their preferred shell or because one of the ports lists it as a dependency. Either way, now would be a really good time to check if your machine has bash installed if you haven’t done so…