Jeez! A guy can’t be away from the Internet for a couple of days without everything changing. One of those changes is that a new version of Emacs, version 25.3, has been released. This is an emergency release to fix a security issue with Enriched Text mode.
You can read the details in the announcement but it’s probably a good idea to upgrade even if, like me, you aren’t using the X support. I did my usual compile-from-source dance without any problems.
I’m writing this Monday night after Irma came visiting. First off, thanks to the many people who wrote—either directly or through Disqus—to send their well wishes. I appreciate your concern and good thoughts.
At the last moment, Irma shifted east onto the mainland and went up the middle of the Florida peninsula rather than up the west coast. For those of you not as intimately familiar with hurricanes as we in Florida are, that’s important because hurricanes are basically heat pumps (technically a Carnot heat engine) and once over land they lose access to the warm coastal waters that are their source of energy. The result for Tampa was a routine Category 1 or 2 hurricane rather than the devastating monster storm that Irma was promising to be.
We did lose power Sunday night and it still hasn’t been restored. Once it is, I will publish this post. I could, I suppose, connect to WordPress with my iPad and write the post directly into the control panel but once you’ve experienced the joy of writing and publishing your blog posts from Emacs, you never want to do that.
Florida officialdom is actually pretty good at dealing with these things so I expect you’ll be seeing this post soon.
Annnnd, we’re back. The power was restored this morning so things have returned to normal. I’ll be pushing today’s post directly.
I don’t use mind mapping so I never paid much attention to org-mind-map, thinking it was a way of organizing mind maps. It is that, I suppose, but what makes it interesting to me is that it’s a handy way of generating Graphviz graphs. It’s really simple for quick graphs and just uses the structure of an Org document to build the graph. Take a look at the README to see some examples.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Irma is scheduled to arrive in about 4 hours so this will probably be my last post until things settle down again and the power comes back. I’ve been hearing disturbing rumors that getting power restored may take some time—weeks even—so I don’t know when things will be back to normal. See you at the other end.
Jerry Pournelle, a well known Science Fiction writer and computer columnist died yesterday. For years, Pournelle wrote the popular Chaos Manor column for BYTE. The column considered computer software and hardware from the users’ perspective.
I’ve long been a fan of his SF, especially Lucifer’s Hammer and Oath of Fealty that he wrote with Larry Niven. Although he’s been in poor health due to a stroke in 2014, Pournelle continued writing and maintaining his blog.
Six years ago, one of my heroes, Dennis Ritchie, died. No one here needs to be told who dmr was or what he did. He’s no longer with us but it’s worth remembering his birthday and sparing a few minutes to think of him and all he did for us and our field.
As many of you know, The Irreal International Headquarters is in Tampa, Florida. Hurricane Irma is currently bearing down on us although at the moment it doesn’t look as if we’ll get a direct hit. Nonetheless, it’s likely that we’ll at least lose power and be unable to post. If Irreal stops posting for a few days, that’s why.
UPDATE : is Tampa → is in Tampa.
In yet another win for moving your digital life into Emacs, wasamasa has released nov.el, a package for reading EPUBs in Emacs. Until now, I have always opted to get digital content as PDFs rather than EPUBs or MOBIs because of the great tools in Emacs for reading and annotating PDFs.
Now, thanks to wasamasa, we have the ability to read EPUBs in Emacs too. This would be even better, of course, if publishers would give up DRM. Until that happy day, we’ll have to continue using proprietary apps for reading most books but wasamasa’s package is a great start.
#Emacs #Orgmode 9.1 is out. A big thanks to every contributor for this major release!
— Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) September 6, 2017
I’ve already updated, of course, but Phil tells me I may have a bit of OCD. In any event, thanks to Bastien and the other contributors for their hard work in producing one of my most vital tools.
Over at the Emacs subreddit, ambrevar has an interesting post in which he makes the case for Eshell. One of the frequent complaints about Eshell is that it doesn’t work like a “normal” Unix shell. Ambrevar acknowledges that but says it’s a good thing. As he points out, even today we have terminal emulators that duplicate the behavior of ancient physical terminals and the standard shells are designed to work with them.
His post is interesting because he approaches the subject as one who has moved as much as possible into Emacs. He even uses Emacs as his window manager. What struck me was that I kept thinking, “Sure, that’s how I do it.” as he explained how he does tasks that are difficult in a Unix shell very easily in Eshell. I never really thought much about it because those ways of working are natural—being the standard Emacs way of doing things—in Eshell.
As ambrevar admits, Eshell is not perfect but it is improving as more folks adopt it as their standard shell and bug and feature requests filter back to the maintainers. I try to use Eshell exclusively although sometimes years of habit having me bringing up bash in the same old terminal emulator. Eshell is just another way of not having to leave Emacs and the comfort of working in the familiar Emacs way.