Martin Geisler Online

The next stable version of [Debian][] codenamed Sarge was supposed to be released today… They have either done it in a really quiet way, or not at all — I fear that they missed their target date again.

It’s a shame, for I guess there are still some server admins out there who are waiting for a new stable version of Debian — I’ve been running the “testing” distribution for a long time and I’m very satisfied with the stability of it.

My original plan was to stick with Sarge and thus obtain a system which would be stable and only receive security updates. I’m actually not sure anymore if I’ll do that, or if I’ll keep moving along with “testing”. Any Debian users out there — what do you plan to do?

I’ve installed a new version of [GNU][] [Emacs][] on my [Debian][] system. The cool thing about this version is that is has supprot for multi-tty which means that it can show frames om multiple different kinds of TTYs.

Normally you can start your Emacs in X and use emacsclient to quickly bring up a new frame. This works fine — but in fact it’s a little too much, for you always get a new frame (in the X environment) when using emacsclient. If you are logged in using something like SSH, then what you really want is to have emacsclient show a frame on your terminal.

This is exactly what the Emacs multi-tty support project gives you! Starting emacsclient with the $DISPLAY variable set gives you a new frame in X, as you would expect. But if this variable is unset (as it is in a SSH session without X forwarding) then you get your new frame in the console. You then of course have access to Emacs just as you left it, including all the buffers.

So I can now just leave my Emacs running at my computer, and to check mail I just SSH to my box and connect to the running Emacs process. There I just switch to my [Gnus][] buffer instead of having to kill it first. Very sweet!

Oh, and by the way: the author says that emacsclient starts up faster than vi… In fact, I think I’ll make vi a symlink to emacsclient from now on… ;-)

Here in Switzerland we have spiders, just like in Denmark, but not quite… The problem is that they spiders here are so dammed big compared to the ones from back home! :-)

Yesterday evening I went out on our balcony to windup the marquise because it was starting to rain a bit. And when doing so I suddenly saw a dark thing move up under the roof: a spider. I hate spiders, especially when I am surprised by one. If I’m only aware of it, then it’s okay, but when I suddenly see one where I didn’t expect to, then it’s another business.

Of course the circumstances could also have been better: I had just been watching some of the extra material from the Return of the King, in fact I had just seen how they designed the mighty spider Shelob.

You can now leave comments on all the pages here and not just on posts. “Pages” are [WordPress][] terminology for static things, such as my [PHP Tutorial][], and “posts” are the date-based stuff like what you’re reading now.

Having just read the very interesting and throughout explaination by Michel Fortin of his problems with the WordPress filters when trying to get [PHP Markdown][] right, I think it’s amazing that it works at all!

His experience together with the recent discussion started by Denis de Bernardy about the plugin system (and specifically the hooks offered to plugins) seems to suggest that the whole system could use some rethinking. (And when doing so, then please document it! :-)