Occasional · Ramblings

Why are the great pioneers of computing unknown to the world? Not only to laymen but also to most of us who count ourselves as professionals. We are all so obsessed with the new that we neglect to use the old, tried and true.

Recently when in need of a simple markup language for some text processing it occurred to me to use a macro processor. So of course I searched the web. After examining and discarding many possibilities including asciidoc, alf, troff, groff, m4 and several others that I have forgotten I came across the Wikipedia page on the subject, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro. There I found several references including one to ml/1. I was already familiar with GPM but ml/1 which was created at about the same time was new to me.

Well after reading Bob Eager's pages on the subject (http://www.ml1.org.uk) and feeling that this was just what I needed I searched for some easier tutorial material on the same subject and found Parzival Herzog's page (http://members.shaw.ca/parz/ML1.html). I downloaded both Eager's and Herzog's binaries to my Ubuntu laptop, both worked straight out of the box. I am using Herzog's now, not because I have any opinion about either but because Herzog also supplied a set of macro definitions for generating HTML! So I don't even have to learn how to use ml/1.

It seems that I am Smalltalk

Which Programming Language are You?

A Ruby/GTK based program receives signals from the window manager when a widget is destroyed.
When the user clicks the close button on the title bar GTK will call the handler for the delete event.
What happens next depends on the return value.  If the event handler returns false the destroy signal will be emitted to each widget.  If the handler returns true nothing further will happen.
So, you can ask the user or check the program state or toss a coin to decide what happens next.  If you return false you will receive a signal for the destroy event.  You should handle the destroy event of the main window by finishing any saving of state and so on and the calling exit to shut the program down.
If you don't handle the destroy event the window will disappear but the program will still be running.  Of course this might be what you want if the program is supposed to continue without a user interface but it isn't very common.

References: http://ruby-gnome.sourceforge.net/programming/hello.html

I'm trying to do my bit toward saving the planet, or at least saving some good stuff from destruction. 
Perhaps you can help:

Click to join Drammen_freecycle

Click to join OsloFreecycle

Thanks to P. Z. Myers for the link on Pharyngula to Evolution Blues.

Good to see that the devil still has some of the best tunes, shame they have to be turned to arguing against such Idiocy.

I've just installed Thunderbird and the Webmail extensions for Hotmail and Yahoo.

Brilliant!  Now I have the best of both worlds: access to my email when I am away from home and a local copy on my own machine that I can consult off-line.

Didn't think I was quite that depressing:

Which Philosopher Are You? Your Result: Jean-Paul Sartre The leader of modern Existentialism, pondered such questions as why don't I jump off a cliff? French, kinda moody, but won a Nobel prize for literature, which, being moody, he rejected. "Hell is other people."
Aristotle
Socrates
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Rene Descartes
GWF Hegel
Which Philosopher Are You? Take More Quizzes

Still at least Aristotle and Socrates came next.

I'm a Bible scholar it seems:

I bought a CD on Saturday.  Actually I bought two, or so I thought.

However, I see that one of them isn't a CD at all now that I look at it more closely.  It is a Sony BMG Copy Control disk.  I thought they had stopped doing that.

It's the first and last Bertine Zetlitz album I'll buy, in fact I'm seriously considering returning it and wiping the ripped files.

Yes you read that correctly, I didn't discover that it was a Copy Control disk until I had already ripped it for use in my car MP3 CD player.

I use CDex which seems to be able rip pretty much anything. 

Still the fact that I can play it on my computer (in fact all the computers in the house plus my car, my hifi and both portables) is no guarantee that it will play on all others.  See Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen's blog entry on the subject for a really sorry tale.

So Bertine Zetlitz you have lost a customer, I'll probably remain a fan of the music but I won't be buying any more unless you issue it on real Compact Discs.

Bye the way, does anyone have a list of the artists who signed the FT advertisement supporting extension of copyright?  I think they should be  blacklisted too. 

Looks like I'll have to listen to a lot more indie music in future.

"Remember, America was founded by Puritans, people so uptight the Brits kicked them out - How anal do you have to be for the British to go "Get the fuck out"?..." Robin Williams

Taken from http://blog.wired.com/sex/2006/12/i_think_the_tea.html
 
Oh, and in case you were wondering: I am a Brit.

Interesting article on Wired: Cell Phones Freed! Poor Suffer? 

It concerns the TracPhone company in USA which sells pay as you go mobiles.  It is concerned that the freedom to unlock the phone will hurt its business model because people will buy a subsidised phone, unlock it and sell it on. 

I wonder, is this really a major problem?  Such mobiles are common here in Norway and there seems to be no market for unlocked cheap phones.  Most such mobiles are sold by the same companies and shops that sell full price high specification mobiles; they seem able to serve both markets.

There is a great web site that has quite reasonable high resolution scans of paintings for download.  Its called The Art Renewal Center.  I'm a great fan of Alma-Tadema's work but most of the copies that I had found earlier were not very big so I was really pleased to find some images that had to be downsized to fit my 1600x1200 screen instead of stretched.

But the world goes on re-inventing ways to be stupid.

In the country I used to call home a headmaster is considering banning mobile phones from school because a video of some students fighting was posted on YouTube.  Where I live almost all high school (ungdomskole, videregående skole) have mobiles, except those who have consciously chosen to not have one and probably a majority of primary school pupils have them too. The rule is simply that they must be switched off in class.  The rule seems to be respected.  Also misbehaviour seems relatively rare; of course things do go wrong, I don't live in paradise.  But why are British schools having so much trouble?  And why do they seem so reluctant to tackle the actual offences. 

They seem keen to offer counselling to the victims of bullying but not to prevent the bullying itself.

Here the schools my children attend tackle misbehaviour very directly.  Mobiles are confiscated and the parents must visit the school to retrieve them if they are misused.  Both physical and psychological bullying are taken seriously. 

Here teenage boys with nose rings, tattoos and aggressive hair styles help old ladies and mothers with prams get on and off buses. 

Quite likely all three will be wearing 'hoodies' but no one feels intimidated so why is the prevailing impression of the UK one of tension; is it just the media or do people really feel and behave that way.

At last I am back in Norway.

It's so good to see free people again and an airport built to impress with its lightness and effectiveness instead of an expression of state power. 

Does anyone notice all the little artworks in the floor at Gardermoen?  Little touches like that and the brilliant use of natural light make it one of my favourite places.

One luxury that I do enjoy is frequent long hot baths.

Of course, I can't have one this evening in my luxurious hotel room because not only is there no hot water, there is not water at all!  Good job there was some water left in the tank of the coffee maker or I wouldn't even have been able to have a hot drink.