51–60 of 98 posts
I did not quite get why is he starting emacs with "git re-edit" with re-edit being some Perl script. What is the role of git in this setup?
No reference to the full quote? :) "You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. No, no, no, don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to. " - Buckaroo Banzai
The movie is quoting that from a neurosurgeon. I first saw that line in a book about the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Incidentally, this is also why I never like modifying a working system unless it's absolutely necessary. It's why I find auto-updating apps so infuriating. The trend is that every app, OS, and driver insists on being self-updating. It's going to be very difficult to maintain a reliable system if you're doing anything complex. Privacy issues aside, that's another reason I never plan to use the continuously self-upda…
I think this is a serious issue, at least for developers. I've never been burned by a self-updating browser, but anything beyond that seems downright unacceptable. There are just too many fragile, hand-managed dependency chains at work even in good setups.
I develop browser-based software which, after one Chrome update, was rendered unusable by a bug in Chrome. Fortunately, Google pushed out a new version with a fix the next day.
I almost hesitate to say this, but it seems to me that emacs needs a new command line parameter to allow the user to specify the location of the socket file.
If you actually are talking about "emacs" and not "emacsclient", then the argument you want is --eval '(setq server-socket-dir "/what/ever")'
> This computer stuff is amazingly complicated. I don't know how anyone gets anything done. Indeed.
As a sysadmin on a Windows network of ~100 computers, this story makes me want to cry, although maybe for the wrong reason: I see weird problems of the sort "It did work before I went on my lunch break" on a fairly regular basis. How often would I like to go down the rabbit hole and explore these problems in such depth, but if I did that, I would hardly get any work done. The frequency at which our users run into the…
One of the biggest cultural changes I had when I jumped the fence from Windows to Linux was the reboot. On Windows, the culture was strongly "reboot first, if it still happens, then it's a problem". On linux, it was a measure of last resort, because then you can't fix the problem (as you say). Obviously the latter is the best way, but it's interesting that the culture of the two systems is so different, no doubt born…
As a sysadmin on a Windows network of ~100 computers, this story makes me want to cry, although maybe for the wrong reason: I see weird problems of the sort "It did work before I went on my lunch break" on a fairly regular basis. How often would I like to go down the rabbit hole and explore these problems in such depth, but if I did that, I would hardly get any work done. The frequency at which our users run into the…
I read this, but seemed to skip over the part where he explains why this changed suddenly, when the behavior was documented? What changed to make the perl become capable whereas previously it lacked the low port capability?
He usually started emacs directly. In this case he started emacs via a perl command, very very indirectly. Also, a recent change was an admin setting TMPDIR, previously it had been left unset. So it was a combination of two things that triggered it, and not one alone.
And this basically sums up all the troubleshooting time sinks I've experienced in my career.
> This computer stuff is amazingly complicated. I don't know how anyone gets anything done. Indeed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Incidentally, this is also why I never like modifying a working system unless it's absolutely necessary. It's why I find auto-updating apps so infuriating. The trend is that every app, OS, and driver insists on being self-updating. It's going to be very difficult to maintain a reliable system if you're doing anything complex. Privacy issues aside, that's another reason I never plan to use the continuously self-upda…
On the other hand, chasing after CVEs is also infuriating, but in the opposite direction. auto-update makes it possible to live in an environment where security issues are found by the bucket load every day. There really isn't a good answer either way, but between "breaks occasionally" and "needs a full-time admin, but updates are vetted", I prefer option 1 for my private systems, and option 2 for things that run in…