Mikey Boldt

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Archives for November 2011

Install Emacs 24 in Ubuntu

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[2012-07-19] Update: Please see Damien Cassou’s comment describing his emacs snapshot PPA moving forward.

After reading several good things about emacs 24, I decided to give it a shot. A little googling led me to Damien Cassou’s emacs snapshot PPA. Simply ran the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cassou/emacs
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot
emacs-snapshot

Everything works great so far, specifically email in mew, chatting with jabber.el, my org files, and org2blog/wp. Played with the built-in ELPA package manager a little, and I really thing it will be nice to avoid manual package management.

Haven’t decided if/how often I’ll update my snapshot. Maybe until emacs 24 comes out in the Canonical packages? But then will I want to stay on the bleeding edge? Thoughts/suggestions/experiences?

A Year of the Lord: Liturgical Bible Studies (Review)

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Having followed the daily Bible readings and saints of the Orthodox Church Liturgical Calendar, I felt like I was too far down in the weeds. I know that there is deep meaning to the broader organization of the Church calendar, so I was looking for something to help me understand it better. Around the Liturgical New Year, after hearing a couple of good snippets and recommendations of The Year of Grace of the Lord (non-affiliate link), that seemed like a logical choice, so I ordered it. However, the order got mixed up, and instead I got the series A Year of the Lord: Liturgical Bible Studies by Theodore Stylianopoulos. I’m a pretty laid-back guy, so I figured I’d give this series a shot.

Each week of the Church calendar corresponds to a chapter in the book. Each chapter contains sections discussing a topic in the week’s calendar: the Sunday Bible readings, important saints, feasts, fasts, etc. Sections provide a discussion of the topic, a relevant Bible passage, study questions, and questions that direct the application of the section to one’s life. Meditations, prayers, and hymns occasionally appear at the end of a section or chapter.

I’ve been reading one section each morning, which fits well into my day. The sections are short enough to be a reasonable daily devotional for busy people, while long enough to contain a good lesson. The study questions reinforce the Bible passage for the topic, and often highlight aspects of the reading I had glossed over. The application questions, while good though exercises, will probably not stick with me or change my life–simply because making such a change would require a stronger focus over a longer time, rather than something new each day.

My favorite part of this series is the weaving together of the topics, the Bible, and the Church calendar. This has started to show me the depth of the Church calendar, more so than the daily readings I was doing before. The book ordering mix-up that brought me this series has given me exactly what I was looking for. Perhaps next year I’ll actually get The Year of Grace of the Lord, but until then, I’m happy with what I have.

A Morning Prayer for Geeks

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I love the Morning Prayer of St. Philaret of Moscow. It contains petitions applicable to all people, while seeming particularly relevant to the work of a spiritual father, receiving guests and providing spiritual guidance. I think I would benefit from a morning prayer targeted towards the type of work I do. I don’t mean something tongue-in-cheek, like The Book of Uncommon Prayer, but a genuine prayer for we who work with our minds. While I do not consider myself to have any particular gift for prayer writing, I humbly present my stab at a morning prayer for geeks:

Glory to you, O God, who has provided me with work to do.
As I focus my mind on this work, let me pray without ceasing in my heart.
Grant me the wisdom and power to successfully perform my tasks, that this effort and its results may be to Your glory.
Amen

Solved the “abfh” Problem

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One Linux server at work has always messed up my keyboard mapping when connecting to it via VNC. Previously, I had worked around this issue by changing the window manager from gnome to evilwm in my ~/.vnc/xstartup file. This got me by for a while, but I had trouble with the mask keys when I switched from Mac OSX Lion to Linux, so I came back to solving the problem. In my googling, I found this often-encountered situation referred to as the “abfh” problem1.

This post, and in particular, this comment provided the best solution I found for the “abfh” problem: 

dcatdemon said...
Perhaps you can try this:

1. edit your $HOME/.vnc/xstartup
2. put the line "export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1" before your gnome-session.
3. restart vncserver.

and lo, it works :).
credit must go to this link.
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190865#c7

There are many other possible solutions, but this seemed cleanest and simplest–and you gotta love a 1-liner.

Footnotes:

1 “abfh” refers to the output of pressing the standard key-mashing sequence “asdf”.

Why I left Mac OSX for Linux

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Background

In my days, I’ve explored many different operating systems. My first computer exposure was playing games like Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Odell Lake on an Apple II in the classroom (ah, the classics). The first computer in my home, an Intel 386, ran DOS, eventually with Windows 3.1 on top of it. Through high school and college, I ran many flavors of Linux and BSD. When I started collecting a paycheck, I got a Mac, which provided the best of both worlds—a full Unix environment with hardware that just works. I don’t have as much time as I used to for tinkering with device drivers, X configuration, and window managers, though I still spend a lot of time on the command line, so Mac was a good fit.

Lion

First, I admit I hastily upgraded to Lion. I hadn’t had trouble with any previous OSX upgrades. A coworker had good things to say. I was sold. And the upgrade went fine (and even if it hadn’t, I still had my Time Machine backup). But when I saw the new features, I started getting uncomfortable.

My Computer is not an iPad

In my new Lion environment, the new launcher and full-screen apps make my computer look and feel like an iPad. I don’t want my computer to be an iPad. If I wanted an iPad, I would get an iPad. I understand there is nothing forcing me to use these features, but this direction and philosophy worry me. If this is where the train is going, I want off.

The Final Straw

Being a bit of an experimenter, I decided to try to embrace some of the new features. I added a second desktop in Mission Control and started using some full-screen apps. That’s when my machine started acting up. Every so often, apps would become unresponsive. I could switch between apps, but they wouldn’t respond to input. This, for me, was the final straw.

Horror Stories

Beyond my own concerns and issues, I’d heard several people have bad experiences with Lion. My wife’s network card got flaky after her upgrade. I know folks needed to spend time getting MacPorts back together. One coworker’s machine had severe performance issues after his upgrade, and Apple support walked him through their equivalent of fsck. The filesystem “repair” left his machine unbootable, requiring him to start over at Snow Leopard, upgrade again, and recover from his Time Machine. Then there was Tim O’Reilly’s tweet about Lion. These horror stories were reputable enough for me to seriously question Lion’s quality, and not write off my own experience as a fluke.

Linux

So, I installed Ubuntu Linux, as it has the reputation of “just working.” And, that was exactly my experience. Everything down to e.g. the screen brightness buttons on my MacBook Pro keyboard worked out of the box. I’d heard some murmuring about problems with Skype on Linux, but even that worked fine for me. Now instead of my browser taking up a full 1920×1200 screen, I’m running xmonad in Gnome to maximize my screen real estate. Desktop Linux has come a long way since I first used it in the 90’s.

Conclusion

In brief, I do not like the direction Mac OSX seems to be taking. My computer is not an iPad, and I don’t want it to act like one. I’ve heard about and experienced Lion’s bugginess. Over the years I’ve been using Mac, Linux—specifically Ubuntu Linux—has caught up to the point where it works out of the box, while providing the ability to tweak it to my tastes. Linux is the friend I haven’t seen for years, but after reconnecting we have more in common than ever. It’s good to be back.

Hello, World

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I’m going to start writing a blog.

Why?

A couple reasons for starting this:

Contribution
I’ve certainly siphoned lots of information from others’ blogs. I will add back to the pool of knowledge.
Reflection
Track and follow-up on my decisions, plans, and ideas.

What?

I envision the posts falling into a few categories:

Experiments
I like trying different ways of doing things, and will share my experiments here.
Projects
I will share projects I’m working on and what I’m doing for them.
Opinions
I’m a laid-back guy, but when I have an opinion it’s generally strong and worth sharing.

How?

To start, I’m using emacs org-mode with org2blog to write my posts. I’m doing this because I spend a lot of my time in emacs, and I think the convenience will make me write more.

So, hello, world!