Excession and Video Games

Posted on 2015-03-14 by jcs

Over at Tor.com, Peter Tieryas has a very nice post on the connection between Iain M. Banks’ Excession and a video game. Regular readers—or the merely observant—know that I’m a big fan of Banks’ Culture Novels and of Excession in particular.

What I didn’t know is that Excession was, in part, inspired by the video game Civilization. It turns out that Banks was addicted to the game to the point that once he started writing Excession he had to delete it from his hard drive. Tieryas’ take on and appreciation of Excession pretty much mirrors mine.

We both really liked the idea of metamathics or, as the Minds called it, the Irreal. Tieryas explores the connection between Excession and Civilization as he interpreted it. His interpretation may or may not be the same as Banks’ but it tracks well for me.

If you’re a fan of Banks’ Culture novels, especially if you’re a fan of Excession, you should definitely take a look at Tieryas’ post. It’s almost as enjoyable as Excession itself. If you’re not a Banks fan or haven’t read Excession, you should read them both.

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Working with Key Sequences

Posted on 2015-03-13 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nice post on working with key sequences. He shows how to set up personal key maps with a common prefix. Abrams likes to use 【F9】 as a prefix to several maps. For example, 【F9 m】 is for his music listening. A third character chooses a channel to listen to or, with 【s】, stop the playback.

Next, he considers how to set these key maps from a list of keys and music channels. Nothing too surprising in any of this but then he asks if he can have a single routine to set the keys for all his personal maps based on an input list. To do that you need a macro and Abrams provides one that takes a list containing information about all his personal maps and initializes them.

Finally, Abrams mentions hydra and notes that it’s what you need if you want to be able to repeat a key. For example, you might want a control that adjusts the volume up or down with 【u】 or 【d】. In a case like that, it’s convenient to be able to repeat one of the keys until the volume is at the desired level.

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Did You Know

Posted on 2015-03-12 by jcs

There are only 3 animals that don’t reproduce until they die? I didn’t. One of them is humans, of course, but what about the other two? And why are there only three? See the National Geographic article linked above for the answers. As Spock would say, “Fascinating!”

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Sacha on the Power of Plain Text

Posted on 2015-03-12 by jcs

Sacha Chua has a nice post on the power of plain text. There are, she says, three main ways of storing text1:

  • The Heavy Weight Methods
    This is mainly database systems. Chua says she uses these tools mainly when she’s building software for someone else.
  • The Medium Weight Methods
    Chua mentions spreadsheets specifically but I suppose it could also include word processors or various note taking or GTD tools.
  • Plain Text
    This is her preferred method when she’s building tools for herself. Chua says that as she learns more about Org mode and Org tables, she is using this method more and more.

I’ve written before that I use plain text and Org mode almost exclusively for my data storage and processing needs. As Chua says it’s easy to work with—you can manipulate it using standard tools such as grep, diff, awk, perl or even Emacs. If you need more specialized processing, you can almost always get the job done with a bit of Elisp. In any event, it’s sure to be easier than dealing with a proprietary format even you have documentation on that format.

One of the nice things about Org mode is that it has several functions that make it easier to work with the data in an Org file. Although she’d doubtlessly demur, Chua has at least a journeyman’a knowledge of that. I’ve written a few times about her use of Elisp to process data she’s holding in Org files. You can learn a lot by reading those posts.

Chua mentions some of these Org functions in this latest post and that’s reason enough to give it a read. She hints that she’ll be using and, presumably, writing about Org mode more in the future. That’s good news because I always learn something interesting when she does.

Footnotes:

1

The heavy weight and medium weight designations are mine—don’t blame Chua.

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Link to a Specific Line in a File from Org

Posted on 2015-03-11 by jcs

A nice tip from Robin Green:

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The Magic Story

Posted on 2015-03-11 by jcs

Years ago, I had a printed copy of The Jargon File and spent many happy hours reading through it. If you haven’t browsed through the file, you should. It’s full of screamingly funny tidbits about our Hacker Culture and Language.

My favorite entry, by far, is A Story About Magic that tells the tale of a seemingly magic switch glued to the frame of a PDP-10 in the MIT AI Lab. One day, Guy Steele happened upon the switch that had its two positions labeled “magic” and “more magic.” The switch was in the more magic position but had only one wire attached to it and was therefore electrically non-functional.

Go read the story to find out what happens when Steele flips the switch. To this day it’s still not definitely known how it worked.

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Happy Birthday…

Posted on 2015-03-10 by jcs

…Dark Side of the Moon. The iconic Pink Floyd album was released 42 years ago today. One of the most successful albums of all time, it, even today, pops on and off the Billboard 200. Last week (March 7) it was 196. It’s off the list on the latest (March 14) list but will doubtless be back.

“Money” and “Time” were the two hit singles from the album but everybody I know considers the last two songs, “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse”, to be the enduring masterpieces of the album.

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Why?

Posted on 2015-03-09 by jcs

Words fail me. Why would anyone do this?

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Moving The Custom Data Out of init.el

Posted on 2015-03-09 by jcs

I never use the Emacs custom facility. It puts cryptic (alright, not too cryptic) entries into the custom-set-variables and custom-set-faces lists that are far away from all the rest of the customizations for a given package. Even worse, some packages—I’m looking at you bookmark+—take their existence as license to write data into the lists that they want to preserve across Emacs invocations. That’s particularly annoying because I have my init.el under version control and this causes merge conflicts when I update my other machines.

Happily, Ryan McGeary over at M-x all-things-emacs has the solution. He shows you how to move the custom lists out of init.el (or .emacs) and into another file. You can then load it separately if you like or just ignore it and whatever rogue packages put in it. It’s probably best to load it just in case but it is nice to be able to get it out of init.el.

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Where’s Your Emacs Initialization File?

Posted on 2015-03-08 by jcs

TIL: The Emacs variable user-init-file contains the file path of the current initialization file. (via Daniel Ehrman).

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