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make sure they are in the proper positions (with respect to each other ;-).

presuming such a topic as beer is not going to get you fired, you could get them into the hacking mode w/ a little bit of "spirited" (yuk yuk, i slay me) fun.

the best way to teach is to do, the best way to do is to not fear failure, the best way to not fear failure is to use failure to learn, the best way to learn is up to each person to find. so, don't worry if no one groks your presentation. w/ some luck there will be a bite, if not sooner, then perhaps later.

i am maintaining a port of GNU emacs (which is written in C at its core) to VMS, and am interested in learning about the bug you mentioned.

is the bug report (and more interestingly, the 50-line piece of C code that demonstrates the bug) posted anywhere public? (do you have a link handy?) thanks.

back on topic: i wonder if emacs is considered "enterprise software".

i am maintaining a port of GNU emacs (which is written in C at its core) to VMS, and am interested in learning about the bug you mentioned.

is the bug report (and more interestingly, the 50-line piece of C code that demonstrates the bug) posted anywhere public? (do you have a link handy?) thanks.

back on topic: i wonder if emacs is considered "enterprise software".

let's see how this late-entered comment that is only mildly off-topic fares against the great mass of fervent clickmongers that comprise the slashdot readership...

first off, i sometimes write and most of the time maintain free software (released under GNU GPL or LGPL, no exceptions) for my own happiness and other reasons. you may call it "open source" or whatever, but that particular confusion does not enter here. the relevant point is that writing computer programs is a skill that i search to improve in myself, and both the end product (software) and the search for self improvement are (for the most part) rewarding.

now, i'm not going to tell my personal sob story here on slashdot, but suffice to say that after a bit of looking around, i see enough suffering in the world to conclude that whatever i can do to help others cope w/ it, would be a Good Thing, not just for others but also for myself in that (like the improvement in skills associated with writing software), i can improve my own self-understanding in the process.

but what can i do to help others "cope"? i don't know anything more than how to think logically and to type quickly some strange symbols into the keyboard. and why just "cope"? that's pretty lame when it comes to helping people w/ their suffering compared to, say, providing health care or friendship or even a willing (if unprofessional) ear to the stricken.

my answer to this is to try to encourage people to write free software, since it is the only thing i am certain of. i imagine that if i were a user of software w/o ability to read, modify, change and share the software, the frustration upon encountering a bug or misfeature must be similar in some way to the suffering of others who may not have insight enough into themselves or their situation to read, modify, change and share the improved situation.

suffering is a bug in the happiness (or merely serenity if happiness is too much of a reach) of a person. to "cope" is to work around the bug. to improve the situation is to fix the bug. but to fix the bug you need the source code.

because i cannot relieve people of their suffering, the least i can do is to show a methodology for gaining insight into something (that being the source code of computer programs) and hope that the techniques can be transferred to other things.

anyway, that's why i do what i do. i have not answered the OP's question, but then again, i feel the answer i have given shares some overlap w/ the intent of the question. momentary overlap is what life is all about, after all...

let's see how this late-entered comment that is only mildly off-topic fares against the great mass of fervent clickmongers that comprise the slashdot readership...

first off, i sometimes write and most of the time maintain free software (released under GNU GPL or LGPL, no exceptions) for my own happiness and other reasons. you may call it "open source" or whatever, but that particular confusion does not enter here. the relevant point is that writing computer programs is a skill that i search to improve in myself, and both the end product (software) and the search for self improvement are (for the most part) rewarding.

now, i'm not going to tell my personal sob story here on slashdot, but suffice to say that after a bit of looking around, i see enough suffering in the world to conclude that whatever i can do to help others cope w/ it, would be a Good Thing, not just for others but also for myself in that (like the improvement in skills associated with writing software), i can improve my own self-understanding in the process.

but what can i do to help others "cope"? i don't know anything more than how to think logically and to type quickly some strange symbols into the keyboard. and why just "cope"? that's pretty lame when it comes to helping people w/ their suffering compared to, say, providing health care or friendship or even a willing (if unprofessional) ear to the stricken.

my answer to this is to try to encourage people to write free software, since it is the only thing i am certain of. i imagine that if i were a user of software w/o ability to read, modify, change and share the software, the frustration upon encountering a bug or misfeature must be similar in some way to the suffering of others who may not have insight enough into themselves or their situation to read, modify, change and share the improved situation.

suffering is a bug in the happiness (or merely serenity if happiness is too much of a reach) of a person. to "cope" is to work around the bug. to improve the situation is to fix the bug. but to fix the bug you need the source code.

because i cannot relieve people of their suffering, the least i can do is to show a methodology for gaining insight into something (that being the source code of computer programs) and hope that the techniques can be transferred to other things.

anyway, that's why i do what i do. i have not answered the OP's question, but then again, i feel the answer i have given shares some overlap w/ the intent of the question. momentary overlap is what life is all about, after all...

let's see how this late-entered comment that is only mildly off-topic fares against the great mass of fervent clickmongers that comprise the slashdot readership...

first off, i sometimes write and most of the time maintain free software (released under GNU GPL or LGPL, no exceptions) for my own happiness and other reasons. you may call it "open source" or whatever, but that particular confusion does not enter here. the relevant point is that writing computer programs is a skill that i search to improve in myself, and both the end product (software) and the search for self improvement are (for the most part) rewarding.

now, i'm not going to tell my personal sob story here on slashdot, but suffice to say that after a bit of looking around, i see enough suffering in the world to conclude that whatever i can do to help others cope w/ it, would be a Good Thing, not just for others but also for myself in that (like the improvement in skills associated with writing software), i can improve my own self-understanding in the process.

but what can i do to help others "cope"? i don't know anything more than how to think logically and to type quickly some strange symbols into the keyboard. and why just "cope"? that's pretty lame when it comes to helping people w/ their suffering compared to, say, providing health care or friendship or even a willing (if unprofessional) ear to the stricken.

my answer to this is to try to encourage people to write free software, since it is the only thing i am certain of. i imagine that if i were a user of software w/o ability to read, modify, change and share the software, the frustration upon encountering a bug or misfeature must be similar in some way to the suffering of others who may not have insight enough into themselves or their situation to read, modify, change and share the improved situation.

suffering is a bug in the happiness (or merely serenity if happiness is too much of a reach) of a person. to "cope" is to work around the bug. to improve the situation is to fix the bug. but to fix the bug you need the source code.

because i cannot relieve people of their suffering, the least i can do is to show a methodology for gaining insight into something (that being the source code of computer programs) and hope that the techniques can be transferred to other things.

anyway, that's why i do what i do. i have not answered the OP's question, but then again, i feel the answer i have given shares some overlap w/ the intent of the question. momentary overlap is what life is all about, after all...

check out zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by robert m. pirsig. it is nice book if you're given to wondering where and/or how to wander.

check out zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by robert m. pirsig. it is nice book if you're given to wondering where and/or how to wander.

check out zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by robert m. pirsig. it is nice book if you're given to wondering where and/or how to wander.

check out zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by robert m. pirsig. it is nice book if you're given to wondering where and/or how to wander.

yeah, i know the feeling. :)

well, i'm not a big fan of prescriptive labeling in general.

i wrote some elisp to play GNU Go in an Emacs buffer. check it out! (fishing for bug reports; patches welcome.)

see also: GoMode (emacswiki)

feh, too much work. i'd rather distract myself with emacs.

ttn motto

i can relate.

ratpoision, emacs, and rxvt is all i really need to have fun w/ computers.

viva diversita! (ymmv, flames to /dev/null).

i agree w/ you generally; these "elites" are a strange sort.
their circle is dot-sized, enforced by a bought-out court.
what do they know of the suffering of those around?
what do they care of the ignorance that so abounds?
concentrate power for inevitable abuse.
delegates cower to preserve the livelihood noose.

but "elite" isn't so bad if the elitism fits.
e.g., the most elite hackers don't proprietize bits.
their elitism flows from a practiced philosophy.
(they're really good at it, probably better than you and me.)
let us aspire to be elite in that same mode,
to write the right stuff even if it's lame code.

Emacs Gnus

i would normally say "next!" here but there are sensitive souls out there (w/ whom i can identify completely) for whom re-inventing email clients is a touchy subject, ready to rail on and on about their latest 5MB grep-child. so i add this blurb around the "next!" to cushion the message somewhat. (also, slashdot bean-counting requires this verbosity, blech.)

the only degree you get if you don't pay attention
is a degree of stultification and culture too poor to mention!

mod me up down or sideways, it doesn't really matter;
better get your RSI on, baby, and indulge in mindless chatter!

that was well-written! i fully agree (hic!)

if a lot of people diss on others, placing the others in an easily identifiable box is going to make it easy for the people who diss others to find these others (to diss).

while the spirit of this initiative is worthy, the above fragment of human nature will just get in the way, in the end. to improve things you cannot run from that which needs improvement to some imagined better place. better to stay and grow your own tree of improvement in the current place, even if it is imperfect there, if you care about the place as well as the improvement.

here, the place is the programming mindset, and the improvement is its dissemination into people (young and old, traditional programmers and non traditional programmers), so that the community of programmers can survive and grow. water the tree, don't transplant it.

"could go a long way towards restoring integrity and trust..."

that's the thing, integrity and trust are best built from accountability; all these bills of rights are less powerful than simply gravitating towards software that supports a simple "cvs annotate" (or equivalent). if large numbers of people can't/don't want to do that, that's fine, too; encourage them to make friends with programmers who can, today!

marketing is/was the funky game of the baby boomers; have the rest of us forgotten what it is to concencrate influence on improving oneself? who even cares about phaedrus and the insanity of excellence anymore! and by funky, i mean smelly like an old sock, fetid, stale, putrid, unwholesome, stinky, malodorous, rank, overgrown. i mean, "50% off!" where the price is typically at least 2x that in the first place! i mean, an advertisement on tv that says "the economy turns for me" w/ people THANKING a shopping bag, a piece of packaging, an unlikely to be recycled because it contains wax and/or plastic manifestation of something on the OUTSIDE! with equally DISPOSABLE HANDLES, even! i mean, psychologically fine-tuned megadoses delievered straight to the infant's eyes and ears so that their first words are brand names and jingle fragments! gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! i'm so tired.

i accompanied a young woman to Jamaica and visited a computer shop in Kingston, back in 1998. unlike some other trips, i was strangely unable to finish the log of this one, could be because the blunts were full force, driving on the left side of the road for the first time through the hills and avoiding the pedestrians (you think italian drivers are bad!) left me somewhat befuddled, and i was still very much a child, after all. (not to mention, things didn't work out w/ the woman.)

literary lameness aside, i was able to talk a bit to the computer shop guy (only one, quite fitting as there were no customers at that time of day) a little about free software and in the process learn about the nascent programming market in the region. there are many possibilities for localization and specialization as well as new avenues to pursue, some profitable in the monetary sense, others culturally. i fancied myself setting up shop there and hacking for GNU stoned all the time, but none of that panned out. maybe next life.

i accompanied a young woman to Jamaica and visited a computer shop in Kingston, back in 1998. unlike some other trips, i was strangely unable to finish the log of this one, could be because the blunts were full force, driving on the left side of the road for the first time through the hills and avoiding the pedestrians (you think italian drivers are bad!) left me somewhat befuddled, and i was still very much a child, after all. (not to mention, things didn't work out w/ the woman.)

literary lameness aside, i was able to talk a bit to the computer shop guy (only one, quite fitting as there were no customers at that time of day) a little about free software and in the process learn about the nascent programming market in the region. there are many possibilities for localization and specialization as well as new avenues to pursue, some profitable in the monetary sense, others culturally. i fancied myself setting up shop there and hacking for GNU stoned all the time, but none of that panned out. maybe next life.

unless you're hacking in some kind of lisp (in which case i might be interested in a remote-work gig), no comments plus change everything NOW is likely to result in latent maintenance costs.

although your product ostensibly allows the customer to think aloud and create through rambling (i.e., w/o too much organization), its design and implementation probably deserves more respect than you are giving it. no respect, no love. no love, no commitment. no commitment, no trust. no trust, no future.

hehe, you answer your own question. hate of usloth is not blind in a vacuum; usloth encourages both blindness and so-called "trust". when that trust is ultimately betrayed (as it always is), it is no surprise the result is blind hate. duh.

better to have informed hate, because at least there is a root cause that can be examined and the hate eventually channelled into productive action (like fixing the root cause), presuming the hate is not so off-putting to the recipient. w/ free software, there is much passionate (anti-)advocacy but at the end of the day, code is there to use, improve, and pass around. informed hate as found in the free software community is not so bad, and can even be ludicrously entertaining even when unproductive.

anyway, as for the other two combinations, blind love and informed love, the former leads to betrayal (see above) and the latter has its own dangers but is still much preferable to the grinding drag that is having to deal w/ any kind of hate. but in all cases, those who deal keep it real.

(but make sure you do it legibly. :-)

heh, selling licenses to rent proprietary software is indeed an accounting scandal[1]. it's just taken several decades for most people to realize this. nothing seeds resentment greater than a late realization of mis-applied trust.

[1] don't think so? well if you promise to pay me (too) i promise to lie to you (too). fair enough? let's start! where do you want to go today?

if the OP (a journalist) doesn't like M-x trl-begin-entry (source here) maybe the OP can learn to instruct the machine more to his liking. (insert opportunistic teacher mantra here.)

if your personal temperament allows working with other people, design the core well and bask in the ensuing community effort. if you are more the lone wolf, rapid prototyping (currently incarnated under fad name "extreme programming") is even more indicated (in the medical sense) because you can (re- re- re-) design everything w/o undue discomfort. you could probably post a complete app in a few days, why not?

(do it right and we'll hook it up to emacs, oh yes.)

good luck!

thi

the trick here is to integrate texinfo (standard GNU documentation source format) generation with automake methodology (which assumes texinfo is hand-maintained). in the vein of foo2bar naming convention, the TWERP (Texinfo With Eval-Requiring Predelictions :-) file is processed to .texi with twerp2texi (which also handles indexing, automatic dependency tracking a la depcomp, and Makefile prep).

here's a simple example (from doc/ref/scheme-compound.twerp):

If you are unfamiliar with the inner
workings of hash tables, then this facility
will probably be a little too abstract for
you to use comfortably. If you are interested
in learning more, see an introductory textbook
on data structures or algorithms for an
explanation of how hash tables are implemented.

@twerpdoc (hashq (C scm_hashq))
@twerpdoc (hashv (C scm_hashv))
@twerpdoc (hash (C scm_hash))

The @twerpdoc directives expand to documentation on hashq (from Scheme) and scm_hashq (from C), mined from libguile/hashtab.c, and so forth. modify hashtab.c, do a "make" and the .texi (and .info and .html if enabled) is regenerated.

this differs from the article's system in that outline info (and document organization in general) is maintained in .twerp files, which "pull in" reference docstrings and other bits as needed from source, rather than adhering to "one source" doctrine. probably we will introduce more @twerpFOO directives (e.g., to do bit-field diagram or embedded DAG layout) in the future. for more info, see documentation on twerp2texi itself in the guile docs (in tarball above).

thi

thi

smau smau!

i wonder if slashdot will be around, or if there will be a slashdot.it by then...

if you want truly beautiful software, you have to use truly beautiful process, expose the process, and help both purveyors and surveyors educate themselves to refine their aesthetic.

this article is itself ugly to me because (1) some weird-ass language example; (2) strange formatting that causes "?" to appear in unexpected places; (3) overfocus on the artifact. (feel free to disagree w/ my aesthetic.)

IMHO, admonishing people to write beautiful software is almost as much a waste of time as commenting on such endeavor.... :-/

damn, i knew i forgot something on my support page! herb is very productive to my programming. (should you decide to follow through, please be discreet.)

damn, i knew i forgot something on my support page! herb is very productive to my programming. (should you decide to follow through, please be discreet.)

(why is the vernacular "or" exclusive?)

thi

for newcomers, check out Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright by Eben Moglen.

sometimes, though, it is nice to disconnect. if your trip is a vacation of sorts, you may wish to consider that alternative.

--thi

fwiw, i've put the above on a webpage.