AUCTeX 11.86 released

From the AUCTeX mailing list, a new version of AUCTeX, one of the best LaTeX editing modes for Emacs is now available.  The release mail is here.

Lots more packages are now supported, PSTricks support and a newer framework for viewers seems to be the new features apart from bug fixes.

AUCTeX can be downloaded here.

On Google Buzz

As someone who's sort of hitting the 60 mail threshold of official mails to respond daily and that's NOT counting the unrelated friends,sales,ad pitches emails(yeah I counted for a week and then gave up), Google Buzz is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to give up electronic communications altogether.

Trying to control my inbox, I've switched to working the phones as much as I can though I still have to send followup email 'As discussed....' just in case, the conversation 'supposedly' never took place. :-)  That in itself is tiring, from the talking and the inability to reach some quick conclusions and closing the call.  Imagine, trying to follow up on SMS like posts on a meeting that you have a hard time recollecting?  I'd be back on the mailbox trying to explain/clarify/correct things leading to another chain mail thread.

Right, this is not something which will get used in a corporate setting, you say?  Where I work, email and internal chat tool are the standard communication tools.  In all likelihood, they might try a pilot with a bunch of new recruits.

Really enthusiastic bunch, those guys. :-)

If it ever gets adopted, lots of people are done for.  Especially managers who handle new recruits.  At least in my place. The amount of texting these chaps do are unbelievable.   If they even do a fraction of that on a similar corporate solution, it's going to be a fantastic explosion of real time thinking which I think no one wants to know.

With my friends list (we KNOW Emacs users have millions of friends, right,right?),  I don't have a problem now.  And to be on the safe side, I've switched it all off.  So email it is, folks, to reach me.

It's going to get interesting if it becomes popular.

I think I should go out more

Saw this xkcd strip via reddit.  And actually felt sad over the last panel of the strip. 
I think I'm getting a bit nerdy for my own good.
Feel a bit like Melvin(Jack Nicholson) crying over the dog in As Good as It Gets.

This is not good, not good at all.

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.

Cygwin 1.7 Released

Just saw on the mailing list that cygwin 1.7 has been released. For people who have to work on Windows, Cygwin provides an Unix like emulation on Windows.

Just in time for Xmas and the new year.

Season's greetings to all and best wishes for the new year.

Offtopic Observations

After a bit of travel to Europe, am back.

Welsh signboards make me giggle like a retard. It looks like whatever letters crop ups when a cat sits on your English keyboard.

And it is indeed news to me, that whole swathes of people in the East (Chinese especially) sign off their IM or Yahoo chat with 88. Yep, the number 88.

That is all.

Churn baby, Churn

Rs 19.

That's the fee for number portability.  Less than a half pack of ciggies cost.  With a purported 400 million user base, it's going to be one massive headache for the operator.  Much of the problem is one of their own making.  Increasing the subscribers without attendant increase in cell phone towers.  Dropped calls and no connectivity, with people on prepaid watching their precious talk time go down without a word being spoken, they're going to get socked like crazy by the prepaid crowd.

Everyone of my friends and colleagues are just waiting for this to get rolled out and then, they'd hit the phones and switch. I believe the salesmen who work on commission to close out on subscribers for each operator will make a killing in the first few months.

Though, I'm pretty sure, the operators will find a way to make it a disincentive to switch.  One rumour I heard was that it might take as long as 4 or 6 weeks for the switch to be complete.   If the US experience is considered when portability was introduced, I'd wait a good 6-8 months before switching.

If it comes to that.  I'll take a lower bill and other extra minutes thrown in, anytime rather than switch.  Since I have my broadband and mobile from the same operator, hopefully I have some leverage.

Hopefully.

Another Day, Another Language: Go: From Google

From LWN, I learnt that Google has released a new systems language because....nothing had been done in that area for some time.

So, we have Go.

After you've gone through the FAQs, which I strongly suggest you do, as it contains interesting pointers on the whys and whats of this language,  one has this nagging feeling ....

Exactly what issue are they addressing and for whom?  It's there in the FAQ but are YOU convinced?