Another Emacs 24 Trunk Build available

Another build of what will be Emacs 24 is available here.

Initial Builds of Emacs 24 trunk available

Initial builds of Emacs trunk of what will be the 24.x series can be found here. Note that these are not pretest releases but have fixes and new patches for additional functionality.

Org-mode commit history video

A strangely fascinating video of the org-mode commit history.  Made by Eric Schulte.

Take a look and see Carsten's output there.  He's all over the place.

A little bit of Usenet and its history is gone

From the Register, apparently, Duke University is shutting down its  Usenet server.

Where Usenet first started. 

More here and here.

Gnus: Making your emails a bit more difficult for spammers to harvest

Well, I don't know all the methods that spammers use to harvest email addresses but I got mildly chewed out for putting in email addresses in the reply-to citations of my emails.  I was told to PCYMTNQREAIYR to fix my replies. 

Which I did by configuring Gnus to omit the raw email address in the replies.

;;; setting the reply to omit email address to avoid spam harvesting
;;; see the documentation for line format and the line-function has to
;;; be set explicitly, as per the Changelog.
(setq message-citation-line-format "On %a, %b %d %Y,%F %L wrote:\n")
(setq message-citation-line-function 'message-insert-formatted-citation-line)

Thanks to Daniel Pittman for pointing it out. Though I'm not sure whether it breaks any standards or prevents citation folding, at least for the Gnus mail client at the receiving end.

And there are other acronyms  on the cygwin page that are made up that might be of use too, so be sure to read it

Google goes undirect with Nexus One

I wrote about this sometime back.  And saw a NYT article today on the direct model being done in.

The article itself is clear on who brought the knives out and helped in cashiering the idea of selling direct.  The user comments are even more interesting in that it outlines all the standard issues that people with phones face and how weird their experience is when they got the phone from Google and the carriers hadn't a clue about supporting it.

New features in Emacs 23.2

From the changelog or by C-h n, here's a quick abbreviated list of my personal, noteworthy changes in this release, as I see it.  Of course, you'd need to read the NEWS file to see the entire list of changes.

** The maximum size of buffers (and the largest fixnum) is doubled.
On typical 32bit systems, buffers can now be up to 512MB.

** The pointer now becomes invisible when typing.
Customize `make-pointer-invisible' to disable this feature.

** New command `async-shell-command', bound globally to `M-&'.
This executes the command asynchronously, similar to calling `M-!' and manually adding an ampersand to the end of the command.  With `M-&', you don't need the ampersand. The output appears in the buffer `*Async Shell Command*'.

*** A new command `zrgrep' searches recursively in gzipped files.

** CEDET (the Collection of Emacs Development Tools) is now in Emacs.
This is a collection of packages to aid with using Emacs as an IDE (integrated development environment):

*** The Semantic package allows the use of parsers to intelligently edit and navigate source code.  Parsers for C/C++, Java, Javascript, and several other languages are included by default, and Semantic can also interface with external tools such as GNU Global and GNU Idutils.

To enable Semantic, use the global minor mode `semantic-mode'. See the Semantic manual for details.

*** EDE (Emacs Development Environment) is a package for managing code projects, including features such as automatic Makefile generation.

To enable EDE, use the minor mode `global-ede-mode'. See the EDE manual for details.

** htmlfontify.el turns a fontified Emacs buffer into an HTML page.

The last one, you'll love it when you want to share code with a non Emacs, non IDE user.   I believe it might be the same thing as htmlize.el.

Emacs 23.2 is released

That is all.

Microsoft kills off newsgroups

From the Register, this story is pretty sad.  Newsgroup support for Microsoft products is being removed and users are asked to use forums.

I wonder why they do this, that anything old and that works perfectly well needs to be atrophied and become an internet relic.  Like Gopher.  Being a gnus user, I of course have an axe to grind, though I have no subscription to any Microsoft newsgroups.

I'm afraid, other companies  too would also head for the exits and remove their news servers and everyone ends up on flashy, kitschy website that produces a horrid amount of hits for simple web searches. 

My primary objections to forums are that you need  a browser, logins and lots of clicking hither and thither to get things done and I'm yet to see a good forum software whose search feature works well.  Besides, there is something soothing about text only postings viewed in my news reader.

I wish they'd not do this.

Eighth Emacs Pretest Available

The eighth Emacs pretest is available at the usual locations here and here.

The All New Compact Org Mode guide

Well, at a short 34 pages (PDF), it's definitely smaller than the 200 page manual. And it just goes to show, how much development has gone into org-mode keeping the same simplicity(well, you could argue this doc refutes that notion) but extending it do lots of other things like LaTeX publishing.

I got started on LaTeX with the The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2ε (PDF) which convinced me to use LaTeX to prepare my reports, presentations and letters. And that's definitely longer than the 34 pages of this tutorial.

So, give it a try, it just might help you get started on org-mode.