Monthly Archives: November 2003

Prowling is the word…

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I’ve got Panther installed; I simply requested an upgrade from OS X 10.2, and everything went swimmingly. All my data is available, and all of my applications appear to be working just fine.

Of course, there is one fly in the ointment: my Emacs isn’t working! Wouldn’t you just know it. The version I downloaded the other day simply isn’t working. I’m going to try rebuilding it as soon as I get the Apple Developer’s Tools installed.

From 0 to Geek in Ten Seconds

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So last week I went out and got a copy of the new version of Mac OS X, code-named Panther. I was all prepared to install it on my PowerBook and experience the joy of faster code and prettier windows.

And then, before I installed it, I discovered that my Emacs wasn’t going to work properly on Panther.

You clearly do not appreciate the gravity of that statement. Let me repeat it.

My Emacs wasn’t going to work properly on Panther!

Well, OK, let me explain. It’s like this: I’m a programmer. I write software for a living. I write software for fun. And for a working programming, the one essential tool is his text editor. It’s like the drill sergeant says to the recruits at Marine boot camp: “This is your weapon. You will eat with it, you will sleep with it, it will be your best friend.” Except that in my case, that tool is a text editor.

And my text editor of choice is called Emacs. I can do amazing things with Emacs without conscious thought that would take ten times as long with any other editor. I’ve got Emacs on every computer I use regularly (at present that’s my PowerBook, my old Windows laptop, my Windows desktop at work, and two Sun workstations, also at work). It works pretty much the same on all of them, and it makes my life ever so much smoother.

So the danger of being bereft of Emacs is serious enough that Panther is still in its box.

Today, though, things are going better; I’ve worked out an alternative.

See, the Emacs I’ve been using is a binary I downloaded of an old build of Gnu Emacs only partially made over to use the native Mac windowing system. It’s out of date, which is why it won’t run on Panther. A much better version is available, but the guy who’s been porting and maintaining it has consistently refused to make any binary or source distribution available (possibly because it isn’t officially released yet) and has been telling everyone to just download the latest code from SourceForge and build it. I’ve been unwilling to do that; the latest code might be stable, and it might not. On top of that, for it to run on Panther I’d have to build it on Panther, which means that there’d be a hiatus in the availability of Emacs.

(If there are any other diehard OS X users out there reading this, they are no doubt thinking that OS X comes with Emacs pre-installed. They are right, but it’s a non-GUI version that only runs in a terminal window and doesn’t support the mouse. Not good enough.)

But today I realized that there was another alternative. In addition to Aqua, the native windowing system, Mac OS X also supports X11, the windowing system used on most Unix computers. And Emacs has run perfectly well on X11 for years. And there’s a group of people called the Fink Project (Fink is German for “Finch”, i.e., the bird, so you can stop snickering) who’ve been packaging lots and lots of Unix software for use on the Mac. And one of the packages they provide is the X11 version of Emacs.

So I spent the day first downloading Fink and installing it, and then (via Fink) downloading and building and installing Emacs for X11. I had to do a little fooling around, but now I’ve got it configured just the way I like it, and I think it’ll do the trick.

I’ll spend a few days using the X11 version to make sure it really works for me…and then the Panther can prowl freely.

Looney Tunes!

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I’d been meaning to write a lengthy post on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set, and now Ian Hamet’s done it for me.

My only additional comment is that I’ve having to send my copy back to Amazon for replacement; there’s a glitch in the middle of Rabbit of Seville, right in the middle of Bugs Bunny’s Carmen Miranda act. Of course you know, this means war.

Or not, really, because Amazon gives you 30 days. I just need to get off the stick.

Death and the Dancing Footman, by Ngaio Marsh

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When one thinks of traditional English murder mysteries one immediately
thinks of country houses, billiard rooms, breakfast buffets, dressing for
dinner, butlers, maids, and all the rest of the trimmings. And yet this,
Marsh’s eleventh novel, is only her second country house mystery. (Her
first was also her first novel, the underwhelming A Man Lay Dead.) And like the first, it’s about a house party with a gimmick. And just as this one is immeasureably better than that first novel, so it
also has a better gimmick.

Jonathan Royal is an unmarried middle-aged gentleman of means whose chief
amusement seems to be observing the behavior of other people. After
bankrolling a successful play, he decides to try his hand at a different
kind of drama: a house party made up entirely of people who are at odds
with each other. I won’t go through the list, as that’s part of the fun;
I’ll simply say that it’s a wonder that the murder doesn’t happen as soon
as the party assembles, instead of rather later.

Inspector Alleyn makes a remarkably late appearance in this one, his
latest in the series to date; although he’s mentioned as an acquaintance
by one of the characters early on in the book, he doesn’t actually appear
until page 183. Even then he doesn’t have much to do; once he’s
questioned everyone and done an experiment or two, the answer’s obvious
(to him, anyway).

I had trouble getting started with this one at first, in part, I think,
because the thought of a house party composed of enemies rather put me
off. But I must also confess that I was deeply involved in our projects
during that stretch of time, and hadn’t much brain left by the time I
opened the book.