Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 21 May 2002

# 8:15 PM

fooood

Groceries have now been bought. Berkeley Bowl is a local non-chain supermarket, which has any number of interesting quirks. For example, it's the only market I've ever seen which has Ready Made and the Utne Reader but not the National Enquirer on its check-out magazine rack. Also, they do not stock any Coca-Cola products. I do not know why, but it's likely to be because the store is run by ex-hippies (they have a complete selection of organic and other good-for-the-environment stuff) and they have some issue with Coca-Cola. However, they stock plenty of other megacorporate products (Kleenex, for instance) so I am not sure.

geekery

Emacs 20 has an irritating bug in its "customization" code. When you ask the customizer to save your changes, it writes a bunch of Lisp forms at the end of your initialization file (.emacs). If it sees there's already a block of forms that it wrote, it is clever enough to replace them without clobbering what you put in the file by hand.

However, if you have byte-compiled your initialization file, which you might like to do if you have lots of Lisp functions in there, then it goes and writes its stuff at the end of the compiled file. It does not know how to remove the existing byte-compiled version of its stuff from before, which means all the settings get applied twice, and any side effects happen twice. Worse, the next time you modify your personal set of Lisp routines and recompile the file, those settings get clobbered.

The Right Thing would be to modify the source file, which will cause Emacs to ignore the out-of-date compiled version, and notify the user that they may want to recompile. (You don't want to recompile every time you tweak something, it's quite expensive.) A user who has a byte-compiled init file can be assumed to know what the program is talking about. For all I know this has been fixed in Emacs 21, but I'm not particulary interested in upgrading (it's likely to break a lot of my complicated custom Lisp...)

# 3:30 PM

One is not entirely clear as to where the month went. One also suspects that one has forgotten to move one's car to avoid street sweeping and will now owe the city $26.

The computer got a lot quieter after I removed one of the fans, which seems to have a vibration problem. I upgraded to a 2.4 kernel; despite earlier concerns, it seems to work quite well for my purposes, and is noticeably faster in some situations. (It's not obvious which of those are due to better hardware though.) Bonus, the combination of the new machine's video card and the new kernel enables accelerated 3D graphics, which means that if I ever feel like playing elaborate 3D games it'll be possible.

Desperately need to buy groceries.