Somehow the presence of a hundred billion .tar.gz files on the Internet prevents Google from giving me this very simple tip. Just opening a .tar file in Emacs will let you browse it as if it were a directory. If the file is gzipped, you need to enable auto-compression-mode: either do M-x auto-compression-mode or (setq auto-compression-mode t) (e.g., in your .emacs file).
June 29, 2007
Browsing gzipped tarballs in Emacs
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Google Desktop for Linux!
Hooray! Beagle search for Gnome? Boo! Go away!
Google, if I give you all my data, do you promise to be gentle?
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June 15, 2007
Taking Direction
Is there a way to give feedback when Google Maps gives you a bum steer? This morning, I was driving from Westfield to Murray Hill in New Jersey and Google Maps advised me to turn North on Union Ave in Scotch Plains and cross Route 22 (here). The only problem is that there’s a concrete divider on Route 22 at Union Ave (which is clearly visible here) and it’s not possible to cross there. I had to go a few miles East on 22 to Glenside Ave. Luckily, I knew where I was at that point; if not, I would have been screwed.
Now, I’m the kind of good citizen who fixes grammar on Wikipedia and blogs about bugs in GCC. I’d like to tell Google about their terrible mistake and give them a chance to make it up to me. But I can’t find any email address or web form that seems appropriate.
It may be the case that they don’t want feedback. After all, why should they trust me on this? Oh, well.
June 12, 2007
Fixed Gears, Fun?
I’ve seen and heard a lot of content-free snark about fixed-gear bikes lately, as in this recent NY Times Style article, but I’ve never successfully gotten anybody to explain to me why they are fun to ride? For the record, if you are interested, one Mr. Sheldon Brown makes a pretty compelling case and the Wikipedia has a characteristically objective take. This makes me want to try one out. Although I must say , as a novice city bike rider who huffs and puffs his way up the gentle slope to Prospect Park, I enjoy coasting. Coasting is fun.
June 1, 2007
Did you know AA alkaline batteries could explode?
I’m sitting in the living room and BLAM! like a shotgun blast. I walk into the kitchen and the clock is laying on the floor, one half of an AA battery lying next to it. On the wall—five feet away!—there’s a splatter of some battery-related gunk. On the counter—several feet in the other direction—there’s some kind of wadded-up, gunky something-or-other.
You may have heard that laptop and cell phone batteries can explode (see here, here, and, for video, here), and this seems to be a concern for rechargeable batteries in general. But plain alkaline AAs? Who knew?
Having now seen what the humble AA can do, I’m going to rethink holding my laptop on my lap and/or keeping my cell phone in my pants pocket.
May 30, 2007
Multi-line Comments in Make
You see, this is why I hate Make. Did you know that a backslash at the end of a comment line extends the comment to the next line? For example:
# This is a comment \ and this is still a comment
This is all very nice and logical—a trailing backslash means the same thing no matter where it appears in a file—but it has all the niceness and logic just exactly backwards. The behavior of (line-based) comments in every other programming environment I know of is: a comment character (in this case ‘#‘) introduces a comment that is terminated by the end of the line; if a line is not preceded by a comment character, it is not a comment.
This may seem harmless. But consider the following:
FILES = \
file1 \
file2 \
file3
Now suppose we decide to temporarily remove file1:
FILES= \
# file1 \
file2 \
file3
Does FILES equal "file2 file3"? No! FILES is empty. And that’s if you’re lucky and you didn’t get some weird syntax error.
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May 29, 2007
Is Bush a Neoliberal? No.
Do me a favor here… is it really 2007? And is Richard Cohen really writing this column on how George W. Bush is a “neoliberal”? Are there no limits to the sage pundit’s lazy contrarianism?
Cohen says he “never really knew what [neoliberalism] meant”, but the term should be revived because George Bush is “more liberal than you might think.” The evidence for this is: (a) No Child Left Behind (a bunch of meddling, liberal do-gooderism), (b) all the incompetent blacks, women, and Latinos in his administration (hiring poorly qualified minorities is just so liberal), and (c) conducting a botched foreign war and justifying it with high-flown Wilsonian rhetoric (losing wars is just so liberal).
Mr. Cohen, I do know what neoliberalism means (if you want to know, you might have Googled it; it’s not that complicated). George Bush is not a neoliberal. And items (a), (b), and (c)—while they ring nicely of the conservative caricature of The Left—are not evidence of neoliberalism. Quite the opposite in fact.
I understand the urge to paint George Bush as “not conservative” (this has been Andrew Sullivan’s bread and butter for about four years), but “not conservative” is not “neoliberal.” (Duh.) And what we really don’t need right now, at this point in history, is a supposedly “not conservative” columnist in the Washington Post using the word “liberal” as an essentially meaningless all-purpose insult.
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May 23, 2007
The Annals of OCaml Compiler Errors
X is not a compilation unit description.
X is not a file type that the compiler expected to receive as input. For example, X is a .cma file and you’r running the compiler with the -a flag—.cma files are only expected on the final link; linking a library into a library doesn’t make any sense.
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May 5, 2007
Happy Free Comic Book Day!
Go out and get yours! Your local comic book store will only be a semi-intolerable madhouse.
You would think there would be one lousy freebie on offer—and in past years, this was the case—but in fact there are 10 or 12 free comics, ranging from Archie to The Hulk to The Simpsons to The Lone Ranger. Something for everybody.* And you can take them all, if you want. I ended up buying $10 worth of non-free comic books too. So it worked!
In other strolling around Fifth Avenue news: the Sabbath-observing jeweler resized my wedding band for $12 bucks. Trying to cheat me, Upper East Side? (I think the $80 price was to cut and re-join the ring. Whereas it really only needed to be compressed. Jerks.)
And: Empanadas, still delicious!
* Everybody who hasn’t passed through puberty.
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April 27, 2007
Ubuntu Names
Oddly enough, Ubuntu has a web page about the names. Apparently, it just didn’t occur to them to go in alphabetical order until after breezy. But why did they skip C?
I think Adjective Animal would be a great name for their 27th release.
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Procrastiblog 