njr 3.0

…year ago I posted an Emacs launching script which would, if Emacs were already running, use emacsclient to open a file and AppleScript to bring Emacs to the front. It works well and I use it every day, but the AppleScript activating part is very slow. I usually end up just clicking on Emacs' dock icon instead of waiting for it to finish. After a bit of hacking, instead of: osascript -e 'tell application “Emacs” to activate' I now u…

3:44 AM | Radio

…oposal trail. I don't think I've done enough work on background reading, still, but it seems you never can. As a side note, I've been working in MORE the whole time. It still is the best tool I've found for organizing my ideas. I can slice, dice, show and hide things. Hoisting and cloning are wonderful; I've got a template which I wrote from, and another one that I used for my ideas. Being able to cut and paste rules is an…

12:38 AM | Radio

…os;ve got http://web.sabi.net/log/ hosted on my ISP's Web server, instead of redirecting to radio.weblogs.com. Stage two is to replace all the internal links to radio.weblogs.com, stage three is to write an upstream driver that replaces each file on radio.weblogs.com with a redirect page pointing to the corresponding resource on web.sabi.net, and stage four is turning off upstreaming to UserLand. At least this way I can be sure that my Weblog…

4:36 PM | Radio

...-laptop Macs have included an iMac and three Mac minis, so I’ve become very familiar with external enclosures and drive docks. The state of the art in these devices is just bad, and has been for years. I’ve had more hardware failures, both of the drives and their enclosures, than with any other electronics product I’ve used in the past decade. Inevitably when I go to buy another enclosure, I end up spending hours digging through piles of unreliabl...

6:17 PM | Computing

…a crashing bug I found and fixed about a month ago. Part of appswitch’s README justifies its use by the speed advantage over alternate OS X command-line methods for bringing an application to the front. My timings were based on OS X 10.2.4, as of February 2003. I redid the same timings in OS X 10.3.3, adding my launch program, with the following results. Times are in seconds, as measured with time(1): Mac OS X 10.2.4 10.3.3 appswitch -a Emacs 0.35…

1:38 AM | PyCS