Shared links for 2007-11-30

• Comic for 30 Nov 2007
  We all want the hats.
• Visual Dictionary.
  Neat.
• 'When Someone Beeps You, You Know the Reason'
  Read the full paper if you have the time, interesting stuff.
• Exciting Future
  Can't wait!

Shared links for 2007-11-27

• Many Worlds, Most Strange
  I first read about the many-worlds theory in The Hollow Man, one of my favorite Simmons novels.
• Making Mario
• My column on Facebook’s coming social meltdown

emacs-snapshot 20071124-1

It's been a while since I last posted about emacs-snapshot, so here's a summary of the latest changes:

• New packages: nXML, remember.el, bubbles.el (a Same Game implementation), doc-view.el (to view PDF/PS/DVI files in Emacs), ...
• Many commands now have useful minibuffer defaults (accessible using M-n).
• M-q, M-$, TAB now operate on the region if it's active and transient-mark-mode is enabled.
• diff-mode now does word-level highlighting of hunks.

Favorite word of the day

warkitting: a combination of wardriving and rootkitting, where an adversary maliciously alters a router’s configuration over a wireless connection.

(from this paper)

Shared links for 2007-11-22

• Evolution of the heart emoticon <3
• Ethnicity's Role in Social Networking
• The GNU Configure and Build System
• Caja: Capability Javascript

Summing up last night's gigs

Andrew Bird == 100% pure talent.

More on vi, the Esc key, and Ctrl-[

Many thanks to everyone who sent in their thoughts on my post about vi and CTRL-[. Here's a quick summary of the comments I received on my blog and by IRC/email:

• The vast majority of the people who commented use the Esc key.
• Very few people use CTRL-[ (4 out of ~70).
• Many people use keyboard layouts where CTRL-[ is difficult to type (French, German, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, ...)
• A few people have moved Esc elsewhere, such as the Caps Lock key (and here's how to do it, thanks Mark).
• A better alternative is to use CTRL-C, which works on all keyboard layouts. It doesn't do the exact same thing as Esc/CTRL-[ because it doesn't check for abbreviations; dato notes in a comment that this can be remedied in Vim with inoremap <C-c> <Esc><Esc>.
• Some people use the Esc key because it's hard to miss, being physically apart from other keys. Some people, on the other hand, complain that Esc is error-prone on laptops because it's too close to F1, or just awkwardly placed.
• Everybody ♥ helix! (not to be confused with the helix wind turbine)

As a closing note, a followup question from reader Laurent C.: :wq, :x or ZZ? :)

RFC: vi, the Esc key, and Ctrl-[

As many of you probably know, the vi editor has two main modes, and switching back to command mode requires sending the Escape character. This can be achieved either by using the Esc key (the top left key on most keyboards) or by using CTRL-[. The latter has the advantage that the [ key is much closer to the home row than the Esc key, and is thus faster to type. Despite that, pretty much all the vi users I know still use Esc, and I wonder why. I've heard that on some keyboard layouts (like the French azerty), CTRL-[ is actually impossible to type, but in my experience many Free Software people (like me) use the US layout even though it's not their local layout.

So if you have a few seconds, I'd appreciate your feedback (via a comment on this post, or an email). You have the following options:

• #1: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor, and I use CTRL-[.
• #2: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor but I use the Esc key even though CTRL-[ is easy to type on my layout.
• #3: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor but CTRL-[ is too hard to type on my layout.
• #4: I use another editor as my main editor.
• #5: I have no idea what you're talking about, but I wish to state that I will vote for helix in the 2008 DPL elections.

Thanks!

Shared links for 2007-11-10

• Is It Time for 64-bit on the Desktop?
  As unbelievable as it may seem, Windows XP and Windows Vista do not support PAE, and the only way to use more than 3GB of RAM is to install the 64-bit version of Vista...
• Hollywords
  I like the English version of genre. The original is a totally boring word, at least for a native speaker.

Shared links for 2007-11-09

• Smart Women are Scary
• Shivering
• HELIX WIND TURBINE: Small Wind Gets Smart

Rectangles are the new squares

I'm thrilled to find out that Facebook has a group named The CTRL-X R K appreciation society; I'm member #4. C-x r k is one of my favorite Emacs commands.

Shared links for 2007-11-06

• Top Ten Worst Album covers of all time
  Some serious mustaches in there.
• CVE-2007-5795 (Emacs)
  Fixed in unstable.
• More CVSS corrections

Cornflakes Heroes live, 11/07/07

They're back from a week in the studio and are mixing the new album!

Shared links for 2007-11-04

• A regular expression IDE for Emacs
• 2007-11-04: Sinfest
  Sinfest does Superman.
• Tog on Keyboard Shortcuts vs. Using the Mouse
  Not sure I believe it.
• Power Cords: The Bane of the Industrial Designer's Existence

Locating old Debian source packages

So you want to import your pet package into the new and shiny VCS of the day, but you don't have the complete source history at hand, and some of the revisions are too old to be on snapshot.debian.net or were never part of a Debian release and aren't on archive.debian.org?

Here's an easy way out:

1. For each missing source package, look into the debian-devel-changes archive for the MD5 sum of the corresponding .diff.gz file, it's present in the mail sent by katie.
2. Google this MD5 sum. If your source package is sitting somewhere in the ether, the dsc file contains the sum and Google probably indexes it.
3. Fetch your source package, check the signature on the dsc and the integrity of the .diff.gz. If everything looks good, go to step 1.

For the record, I found some of mine on old-releases.ubuntu.com, apt.freespire.org and these snapshots.