Bring on the comment spam

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Comments on this site have been moderated because of comment spam. I have now enabled re-captcha and disabled the moderation queue. Let's see if it works :-)

I invented a word today

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disasswimble (v) To take a portable elecronic device apart so that it might dry after an unfortunate dunking

Thanks to @jerith for formulating the definition and the true life incident that lead to us discussing it.

disasswimble (v) To take a portable elecronic device apart so that it might dry after an unfortunate dunking.

Dell Vostro A860 NIC and Wi-Fi issues in Ubuntu (Intrepid)

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Soon after I had installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my new laptop I realised that something was not well with the networking.

Laptop acquired

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My new toy
Finally something worth blogging about. I finally put the purchase of a laptop high on my list of priorities for this year. My only real criteria were a decent amount of RAM, and that it's not a Celeron-based machine. After strongly resisting the temptation of spending R11000 on a HP Pavillion with all the bells and whistles, and then drooling over a Lenovo N500 at R7500 I finally settled for a more modest Dell Vostro A860.

Nostalgia

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The DailyWTF post What the Ad? - Portability, 1980's Style featured the TRS-80, which just happens to be the nifty little device that gave me my first taste of programming - all the way back in Std 1 (that's 3rd grade for those who don't know their lekker from their kiff).

DesignBay

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I just discoved DesignBay. It works like this: I want a some graphic design work done. I submit a "Design Contest", paying USD30 and providing a design brief and a budget. Designers respond to this, submitting proposals. If I find something I like, I choose one hand over the cash. Or not... and all I lose is USD30.

Compilation queue (cq.el)

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The following is part of my home-grown compilation environment in emacs.
  1. (defvar funclist)
  2. (defvar cq-compilation-started 'nil)
  3.  
  4. (defun cg-init ()
  5. (setq compilation-finish-functions 'cq-call) ;; this function called when compilation has finished - see compile.el
  6. (setq compilation-exit-message-function
  7. (lambda (status code msg)
  8. ;; If M-x compile exists with a 0
  9. (when (and (eq status 'exit) (zerop code))
  10. ;; then bury the *compilation* buffer, so that C-x b doesn't go there
  11. (bury-buffer "*compilation*")

Django going off the rails?

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Looks like there is a new marketing campaign for Django. I wonder what the target demographic is...

XML processing in Elisp

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Recent versions Emacs has built in xml support, and there are libraries available that give you DOM and even XPath capabilities. I've started experimenting with it as I want to process Eclipse Workspaces. Ideally, I should be using XPath, but that has too many dependencies for now (it depends on parts of Semantic). So, using the xml-parse examples on EmacsWiki.org, here is some simple code to get a the "userid" attibutes from all the "to" elements of the following xml data:
  1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
  2. <note topic="weekend plans">
  3. <to userid="1">Tove</to>
  4. <from userid="2">Jani</from>
  5. <heading>Reminder</heading>
  6. <body>Don't forget me this weekend!</body>
  7. <to userid="3">Bob</to>
  8. <from userid="4">Sammy</from>
  9. <heading>Alas!</heading>
  10. <body>A new week!</body>
  11. </note>

Real-life software superheroes

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I only heard about Opera Software's scheduled visit to Durban on Monday. While I couldn't attend the lectures at DUT or UKZN I made damn sure that I could attend Thursday's "informal gathering" at the Suncoast News Café. You see, I started using Opera when it was still ad-supported (and I honestly don't remember the first version number that I used). Before Firefox even existed I was using a tabbed browser with mouse gestures, cool keyboard short-cuts, colour themes, customizable everything and built-in mail client. But I digress...

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