First Emacs Pretest of 2010 available

If you haven't already known by now, the first emacs pretest is available here and the windows binary here.

Debugging your init file for Newbies

If you're starting to learn Emacs, you'd probably would have grabbed bits and pieces of elisp code from different places on the web and plugged into your .emacs.  Mostly, it would have worked without any issues.  But as you keep using Emacs, you tend to forget all that you initially copied and keep adding new ones.

Soon, you have a lot of cruft in your .emacs and one day when you upgrade,make some change or add more elisp code, Emacs errors out on the .emacs code.

How do you fix it?

Well, it's unlikely that you'd have learnt to program in elisp by now but here's a good suggestion by Tim on the gnu.emacs.help newsgroup on how to debug it.

Firefox and Geolocation services

I think it is a bad idea to have this turned on by default.  There is too little privacy already and anything that triangulates you is a weapon sooner or later.  I have been reading Mozilla's Geolocation page and wondering why the permissions have been designed the way it is.  The default is to share your location and to undo it, you have to do it site by site.

That is weird as you'd probably have to do it laboriously for each site.

Why not have a privacy tab panel to gather the sites that you have already given permission and nuke it selectively or all of them at one go?

Well, I have simply turned off the entire feature by changing the default in the about:config settings as mentioned in the above page.