When I cut-and-paste from PDF into Emacs, ligatures come out weird. “specific” comes out 
. (Note that I had to make that an image, because pasting the same text into a Firefox window renders the ligature correctly. The gobbledygook is a control code that is properly understood by the standard GUI fonts. Note also that the cut-and-paste version is a ligature (fi), but the version I type in directly is not (fi).) Of course, there’s ligatures besides “fi”, and hyphenation is always a problem. Is there a magic Emacs incantation to make this work correctly?
February 7, 2007
Fi, O Fi
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Pop-ups, a Third Way
If you set Firefox to block pop-ups, you get this message when a page requests a pop-up:
This is accompanied by a Preferences button with the following options:
Why only “allow pop-ups for this site”? Why not “allow this one pop-up that I’m pretty sure I want to see, but protect me from future nefarious pop-ups”?
This properly belongs in Bugzilla, but I’m sure the developers would tell me I’m stupid and ignore me. See, e.g., this bug that I voted for, like, two years ago.
UPDATE: As I suspected, Bugzilla has entries for why this isn’t really a bug and why you don’t want what you think you want.
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The Congressional Work Ethic
Correct me if I’m wrong: are these Congressmen (of both parties) actually complaining about how hard, nigh impossible, it is to work five days a week? Is Jon Tester (“We shouldn’t complain about a little inconvenience. I got a lot of people in my state working two five-day weeks”) the only Senator who understands how ridiculous that sounds? There are poor people who work two jobs. There are middle-income and rich people (and graduate students!) who work nights and weekends (but not mornings!)…
Here’s an idea: if you don’t like the hours, you don’t have to be a Congressman! I’m sure your top-tier law firms and lobbying outfits will give you a week off every month.
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Procrastiblog 