One thing I really like about stackoverflow.com is that you end up learning as much answering questions on there as you do by asking them.

For example, when I saw this question I was sure there would be a way to delete a region by simply starting to type after selecting the region, but I didn’t know how. However given that this is emacs, I seriously doubted the person asking the question would be the first one to want this particular feature.

I’ve finally corrected some of the mistakes that I published in my blog post about the misuse of using namespace xxx. My apologies for taking this long.

Enjoy!

I had another of these annoying mixed-mode DOS/Unix text files that suffered from being edited in text editors that didn’t agree which line ending mode they should use. Unfortunately Emacs defaults to Unix text mode in this case so I had an already ugly file that wasn’t exactly prettified by random ^M characters all over the place.

I also don’t have the cygwin tools on the machine that I was seeing this problem on, I couldn’t just run unix2dos or dos2unix over the file and be done with it, but at least I had emacs on that machine. So, emacs to the rescue again…

This is a repost from my old blog - I’m moving some of my older articles over as nobody knows how long the machine that hosts that blog will still be around.

highlight-changes-mode – as the name implies, it highlights changes that you make to a file. I do find it useful for the typical scenario of checking out a file, making a couple of smaller changes to it and then having to diff it to work out what you actually changed. As mentioned over at Emacswiki it doesn’t play too nicely with font-locking but I’ll try out some of the suggestions in the “Taming Highlight-Changes-Mode” section on this page. The one big advantage is that it’s available on an out-of-box GNU Emacs, so you don’t need to install any new modes.

If you look at really productive programmers - like the top 10-20% - there are usually a couple of characteristics that they share. Aptitude and in-depth understanding of both the system they are working on and the technologies involved is obviously one very important factor. Another factor that tends to be overlooked is that these programmers are also masters of their tools in the same way that a master craftsman - say, a carpenter - is also a master of their tools. That includes potentially obscure tools, and the ones handed down from grandps or found at a yard sale.

The default installation of msysgit (aka the official git client for Windows) is unfortunately built without python support. There are understandable reasons as to why this is, starting with “where the heck do I find the various python versions on Windows”. For me the problem was that I needed git-p4 to extract some code history out of a Perforce repository and guess what, git-p4 is written in Python. Only solution for me was that I had to find a way to make this work short of throwing Linux in a VM just to get a git import going.

For security reasons, apparently. I can see that making sense with the telnet server but the client? It’s an invaluable network debugging tool, after all, especially in heterogeneous networks.

Anyway, here is how you re-enable it. Just leave the server off.

The perils of buying a used computer - yes, I am too cheap or just not rich enough to buy a new Mac Pro - is that sometimes you find that you inherited “interesting” fixes.

Like this SSD mount:

Yes, that’s electrical tape and no, I don’t agree with this special mounting method. At least they did put some electrical tape between the case of the SSD and the case of the DVD drive.

As a bit of an RSS junkie - see previous post - I had to go look for alternatives to Google Reader. I’ve been a feedly user on and off for a few years but I was never that taken with it. It does seem to do mostly do what it says on the tin and having various tablet apps available for feedly is a good thing, but it tends to run into a few issues with high-volume feeds (craigslist feeds, I’m looking at you). Mind you, the reoccuring Craigslist feed issue seems to be more of an issue with Craigslist themselves than feedly.

The demise of Google reader viewed from a slightly different perspective. I find the analysis from someone who isn’t a proto-geek but rather an investment professional  interesting, mainly because there are insights that some like me - who doesn’t spend the whole day looking at companies and trying to figure out what they are doing as opposed to what they say they are doing - would and this case, have missed.