Today I have learned of M-x toggle-truncate-lines
As an alternative to continuation, Emacs can display long lines by “truncation”. This means that all the characters that do not fit in the width of the screen or window do not appear at all…
You can enable or disable truncation for a particular buffer with the command `M-x toggle-truncate-lines’.
My phrase of the day is metasyntactic variable
A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. The term originates from computer programming and other technical contexts, and is commonly used in examples by hackers and programmers. The use of a metasyntactic variable is helpful in freeing a programmer from creating a logically named variable, although the invented term may also become sufficiently popular and enter the language as a neologism. The word foo is the canonical example.
My coworker was asking me what this foo I keep using in discussion is. So I turned to Wikipedia to give me a clear definition and background. It was listed in the Examples section of the metasyntactic variable entry under Nonesense Words.
Foo is the first metasyntactic variable, commonly used to represent an as-yet-unspecified term, value, process, function, destination or event but seldom a person.
Bar, the canonical second metasyntactic variable, typically follows foo.
Baz, the canonical third metasyntactic variable, is commonly used after foo and bar.
The article also has examples via english words, people, and places. Its an entertaining read.
Its sad to see Fox giving The Firefly Treatment to more shows I like…
From Networks cancel ‘7th Heaven,’ ‘Arrested’:
As for the demise of “Arrested,” it comes just as the acclaimed comedy came back this week after a hiatus to make room for Fox’s baseball coverage. The two back-to-back episodes averaged a paltry 4 million viewers Monday, sending Fox to fifth place in the 8 p.m. hour and putting a dent on the ratings of its lead-out, the rookie drama “Prison Break.”
There is a possibility that the show will be shopped around, but its high cost is expected to be prohibitive for a cable network.
Fox said Thursday that it will pull “Arrested Development” and “Kitchen Confidential” off the schedule for the remaining three Mondays of the November sweep, replacing them with a rerun of the previous episode of “Prison Break” leading into an original episode of the serialized drama.
“Arrested” and “Kitchen” are set to return to their time slots with original episodes December 5, following the fall finale of “Prison Break” on November 28.
I think both shows were only on for three weeks before baseball stuff geared up. Nice way to give them a chance to get an audience. At least they are showing those episodes in order, so maybe its not the full Firefly treatment.
God bless the Internet and/or Wikipedia. They have a very detailed article on the shocker.
Thanks to Linky for writing this post which inspired me to do a web search for my followup comment.
One final thought:
14:14 <SmooveB> I want to know in what universe this is an encyclopedia article
[ Update:
14:24 <spruance> haha roe‘s talking about the shocker too
14:24 <Ark> holy crap, Richard Roeper wrote an article yesterday about
14:24 <spruance> the shocker has jumped the shark
14:24 <Ark> spruance: haha, yes!
Also, Richard Roeper had an article about this yesterday]
Today’s “What Would Dave Eat?” comes to us via Boing Boing: Sandwich cost $47, has 30,000 calories.
There’s really not much more to say than that.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about my feelings on the comcast DVR after being spoiled with a DirecTiVo and a stand-alone TiVo. PVRBlog wrote up his experiance with his ComcastDVR.
His thoughts exactly mirror mine, almost to the sentence, except I don’t yet have a harmony remote for the basement setup. (I have a feeling i’ll get one for Chistmas.) Sarah just HATES the button lag, and, I have to say, its caused me a ton of grief as well. One of the follow-up comments also points out a problem I’ve seen with surround sound just dieing. A reboot fixed it for me as well.
I do have to say, watching TV in HD is a vastly different experiance. Its well worth most of the pain. However, I am crossing my fingers for the coming of CableCARD TiVos and whatnot.
Netflixfan’s post I learned about the Netflix History Analyizer. Its a fun little toy that anaylizes your netflix rental history and generates the following stats:
The nice thing is that as my gut told me, we were still coming out ahead in the deal. We’ve slowed down our renting the past months or so since there is new content on tv, not to mention some baseball games that consumed our Chicago-based lives. But we are coming out ahead, and that’s the big thing.
This time in comic form!
STEPHEN KING BREAKS NEW GROUND AT MARVEL WITH ORIGINAL COMIC SERIES BASED ON HIS EPIC THE DARK TOWER
It looks like they’ll be following the young Roland when he started out his journey. Hopefully we’ll see Cuthbert and Alain.
Also, this marks the first time Stephen King has done original content for comics, so that’ll be good. I guess I’ll have to tell Keith to hold them for me.
Last night Vik and I were getting a burrito when a Spanish version of American Pie came on the place’s jukebox. In the event this should happen to you in the future, here’s some phrases you’ll want to know translated to Spanish (thanks to Google translate):
Today, I learned about the existence of ~/.ssh/rc and some of its side effects.
Today, Dave couldn’t figure out why he was unable to launch an X application from a machine we both use. We both started looking into it, and it looked like xauth wasn’t being called to update the .Xauthority file. We spent a good half hour or more looking around trying to figure out if it was a bug in OpenSSH on his mac, or one on the Linux server, if xauth was wonky, or what other small differences there were between his server side environment and mine.
During the search I found this post on a Debian mailing list. It was a red herring as it had us investigating a few dead ends. However, it did point out to my mind the existence of the ~/.ssh/rc file. Up until this point, I didn’t know of this files existence. Anyway, while looking in ~dave/.ssh/ I saw he had such a file.
To quote from the man page:
$HOME/.ssh/rc
Commands in this file are executed by ssh when the user logs in
just before the user’s shell (or command) is started. See the
sshd(8) manual page for more information.
There was an emacs backup file (rc~) there, which I looked into. At one time Dave used it to set a umask for all his connections that came in via ssh. For whatever reason, he must have decided that was not doing what he wanted, so he removed the umask line, but didn’t remove the file. Because the file existed, ssh was trying to execute the commands in it, and since there was nothing in it, ssh did nothing and dumped him to a shell.
From the behavior of ssh, it appears there is a “default” rc that happens if you don’t have one or one doesn’t exist in /etc/ssh. One of the tasks of this default includes calling xauth if you’re doing X11 forwarding. By having an empty file there, Dave was bypassing all of it. I haven’t taken the time to see what other side effects came about from that, but there must not have been much, as Dave hadn’t noticed it since last April (at least according to the mod time on the rc file.)
Dave just IMed me and told me to look at the sshd man page and see the following:
When a user successfully logs in, sshd does the following:
[snip]
8. If $HOME/.ssh/rc exists, runs it; else if /etc/ssh/sshrc
exists, runs it; otherwise runs xauth. The “rc†files are
given the X11 authentication protocol and cookie in standard
input.
One other thing we learned in this is that xauth is dumb dumb stupid. xauth won’t create a .Xauthority file if there is nothing to put into it, such as when you call “xauth list” when a file doesn’t exist. However, if you do an “xauth list” and you don’t have a .Xauthority file, xauth spits out a diagnostic message saying its creating it. In reality, it doesn’t really create the file. Bad coding on someone’s part. This wasted us time, as we though it was xauth that was broken, not Dave’s ssh environment. One could argue that xauth IS broken by demonstrating this behavior, but that’s a different rant.