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Showing posts from April, 2008

XEmacs is Dead. Long Live XEmacs!

  "We're going to get lynched, aren't we?" — Phouchg And you thought I'd given up on controversial blogs. Hah! Preamble This must be said: Jamie Zawinski is a hero. A living legend. A major powerhouse programmer who, among his many other accomplishments, wrote the original Netscape Navigator and the original XEmacs . A guy who can use the term " downward funargs " and then glare at you just daring you to ask him to explain it, you cretin. A dude with arguably the best cat-picture blog ever created. I've never met him, but I've been in awe of his work since 1993-ish, a time when I was still wearing programming diapers and needing them changed about every 3 hours. Let's see... that would be 15 years ago. I've been slaving away to become a better programmer for fifteen years, and I'm still not as good — nowhere near as good, mind you — as he was then. I still marvel at his work, and his shocking writing style, when I'm grubb

Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate

I recently switched to using OS X full-time for all my client-side computing. Still using Linux on the backends, of course, at home and at work, but I now use Macs for my client machines. I'm not a Mac fanboy. I'm sort of a wannabe Mac fanboy, but I'm not familiar enough with the OS yet (either as a user or as a programmer) to really rave about it. I will say this: it was kinda fun turning off that last Windows box for the last time. My main reason for switching was that I'm getting old and the fonts look nicer. Pretty stupid reason, isn't it? I thought so too. But getting old kinda sneaks up on you. I've gone from preferring six-point font when I was twelve to 20-point font now that I'm 40. So at least for me, my ideal font point size appears to be (age/2) . That sucks. One day I noticed that I could actually read the screen when I was browsing in the Apple store, and I did some experimentation and found that yes, I can actually read normal-person&#