The CVS version of Emacs has finally entered Debian Sid. Sweet.
Two scientific teams are reporting success in experiments that at least hint at the future possibility of mind reading via brain activity monitoring. University College of London scientists were able to identify which of two patterns volunteers were looking at just by watching their fMRI brain scans. Meanwhile, UCLA and Weizmann Institute of Science neuroscientists used electrodes implanted in two pre-surgical patients to record brain cell responses to scenes from Clint Eastwood's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." Based on that data, they then predicted the fMRI signals generated by eleven healthy patients watching the same clip.
Read more on these amazing experiments at this BBC article and the UCLA press release.
(Source: BoingBoing)
If you're into software development for a scientific project, the Open Channel Foundation is a good place to look for resources, which are often free or open source software.
Escher would have love this beautiful self-portrait:
This was taken from NASA's image gallery site. Looking for a wallpaper?
Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative knowledge makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, it has been discovered that negative knowledge does exist in the quantum world. Small objects such as atoms, molecules and electrons behave radically different than larger objects -- they obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
I've been playing a little with Xft Emacs, and, although it mostly works, it doesn't seem to be maintained. A second option, which is very interesting, is Emacs on Aqua, a GNustep/Cocoa porting of Emacs 20.7 (with work in progress to upgrade it to 22.x). I tried it in Mac OS X and it mostly works, and its looks are really nice. I am told that it works on GNU/Linux, but, unfortunately, my attempts to compile and run it have ended in a core dump.
And then, i suddenly realised that i already have an Emacs 22.0.50 with antialising and transparent background:
urxvt -fn 'xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=11' \
-tr -fg gainsboro -bg black &
This is how it looks without any color or face tweaks:
Promising, no doubt... i will be giving my new emacs a try during the next days...
Now that demo and tutorial videos capturing people's maneuvers with their nice GUIs are in vogue, it's nice to remember that, in the beginning, it was the command line.
Matthiew Moy has written a couple of scripts, treplay and tscript, that let you save an interactive CLI session, and download and play it afterwards: he has a demo xtla session in just 22K.
And Masatake Yamato presents ttyrec, and a growing list of promotional w3m videos. Enjoy!
So, this is why they switched... or maybe not!
As always when i start switching window managers, i have already traversed the whole spectrum. And, as nearly always, i've ended up with my oldest friend, WindowMaker. It's robust, efficient, has everything i need, and it's the best handling my beloved dockapps. And it has an old school flavour that i find charming (yeah, i'm getting old). Many people seem to think WM looks ugly by today's standards, but i'll try to make you think twice:
The transparent aterm shows (part of) a blue forest background i created with Gimp (from a regular green one), and there's an accompanying blue emacs theme of my own.
As i said, WindowMaker gives me everything i need, except for one thing: keyboard shortcuts to send a window to a given desktop. Admittedly, it's a little thing, but one i like. Yesterday i fixed that thanks to wmctrl, a command line thingie to interact with window managers (don't miss the tips section of that site). Among other nifty things, wmctrl knows how to send any window to any desktop, and make you follow it if needed. So i just wrote a little shell script:
wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -t $1 [ x$2 = xyes ] && wmctrl -s $1
and bind a key combination to its execution. Perfect bliss.
Yesterday, i pointed you to the excellent video by Marco Baringer about Slime. It is so good, that i will give you again a link to the .mov file and another one for the torrent.
If you have an interest in programming, i bet you'll be left with an imperious desire of learning more about using Emacs efficiently. A key factor for that are, well, keys. Marco has devoted some time to configure his keyboard in a highly efficient and opinionated way. That page is full of hints to optimize your keyboard setup. I for one have picked up the transposition of parenthesis and square brackets for my emacs config:
(keyboard-translate ?\( ?\[) (keyboard-translate ?\[ ?\() (keyboard-translate ?\) ?\]) (keyboard-translate ?\] ?\))
and i use an US keymap, even when my keyboard has a Spanish layout. Finally, the importance of learning to touch-type cannot be overemphasized.
After that, who needs a mouse?
