I was playing with the various shell options - sorry, trying to learn eshell - this evening. While playing with eshell I learned about the second, fully fledged terminal emulator ansi-term.

Most of my machines here run FreeBSD, as does the machine that hosts this blog. FreeBSD’s terminal emulators don’t recognise eterm-color as a valid terminal type, plus FreeBSD uses termcap and not terminfo, so the supplied terminfo file was of limited use.

Phil Hagelberg published an interesting blog post about the Ergodox keyboard. I’m a self-confessed input hardware nerd and have been a Kinesis Ergo/Advantage user for over a dozen years now. I love those keyboards - otherwise I wouldn’t keep buying them - but Phil makes a very good point that they’re bulky, not something you quickly throw into a bag and take with you for a hacking session at the local coffee shop. It’s good to see alternatives out there, especially as there seems to be less of a focus on ergonomic input devices recently.

My hardware “scrap pile” contained a Dell Inspiron 530 - not the most glamorous of machines and rather out of date and old, too, but it works and it runs a few pieces of software that I don’t want to reboot my Mac for regularly. Problem was, I had to rebuild it because it had multiple OSs installed and none of them worked. Note to self - don’t mix 32 and 64 bit Windows on the same partition and expect it to work flawlessly.

Back in 2009 I built a “slightly more than NAS” home server and documented that build on my old blog. I’ve migrated the posts to this blog, you can find them here, here, here, here and the last one in the series here.

The server survived the move from the UK to the US, even though the courier service I used did a good job of throwing the box around, to the extent that a couple of disks had fallen out of their tool less bays. Nevertheless, it continued soldiering on after I put the drives back in and replaced a couple of broken SATA cables and a dead network card that hadn’t survived being hit by a disk drive multiple times.

My normal development workflow doesn’t use that many different Emacs packages. With a few exceptions I’ve mainly worked with a “stock” Emacs distribution and augmented that with a few select Emacs packages that I downloaded manually. It worked for me for a decade or so, and it made it reasonable easy to move configurations between machines - zip & copy was my friend for that, although I’ve since changed that to using dropbox.

Ah, a meta blogging post. Sorry, I try to keep these to a minimum…

For those who haven’t been caught up in the hype yet, Ghost is a new blogging system that is much more minimal than WordPress and the other more popular systems. It’s designed to be much smaller and faster (plus it uses a lot of cool tools like node.js, handlebars etc).

I recently tried to set up the 0.3.3 release on FreeBSD and overall it was straight forward. Node.js is available as a port - just make sure that you’re installing the regular node port instead of the node-devel port as the latter will install node 0.11 and Ghost wants to use 0.10.

The Gnu Emacs for Windows distribution appears to be pretty good at inferring where a reasonable place for $HOME is, straight out of the box. In my case, said reasonable place was %USERPROFILE%/AppData/Roaming which was an entirely acceptable default.

That is, until several other tools entered the picture and disagreed with Emacs. We’ve recently switched to using git at work and the git ecosystem  needed to have some ideas where its home was. I’m using Git Extensions as the “regular” Windows GUI and TortoiseGit for the Windows Explorer integration, plus the awesome Posh-Git that even made me learn basic PowerShell.

Throwing caution into the wind this morning, I’m having an updatefest only a few hours after the software was released:

While I’ve grown accustomed to using Win8 - the Surface RT helped - from using the 8.1 prerelease it really looked like 8.1 would be an improvement, so I bit the bullet and installed the upgrades as soon as they were available.

Well, as soon as I got up the day they were available, that is.

As VS2012’s C++ compiler doesn’t support “true” variadic templates, the new runtime library classes that use variadic templates are implemented using macro magic behind the scenes. In order to get the “variadic” templates to accept more than the default of five parameters, you’ll have to set _VARIADIC_MAX to the desired maximum number of parameters (between five and ten).

For more information, see the “faux variadics” section of this blog post on MSDN.

The “latest” ACCU magazine showed up a couple of days ago after a minor delay:

My guess from my minor experience in software and IT is that “computer says ‘send to India’” :).