I enjoyed reading an article from a fellow named Ben Northrop. About 90% of the posts I find by way Hacker News, et al, are crap; in a roundabout way that’s actually the topic of this post. I am vastly more cynical than Mr. Northrop. I stormed through his essay and was annoyed that the programmer motivation I’d been spending the past few months thinking about was missing from his diagram.…

In the past, passing –without-x-toolkit to the configure script for emacs was sufficient to get it to omit window system support from the build. Maybe this still works elsewhere but on my new work box running Wheezy, I still get a build with X. This works though: ./configure --prefix=$HOME \ --with-xpm=no \ --with-jpeg=no \ --with-png=no \ --with-tiff=no \ --with-gif=no \ --with-x-toolkit=no \ --without-x …

I used to keep a blog where I would write a combination of stories I thought were funny, along with occasional long rambling pieces about politics or technology. After doing this for a few years I realized I’m ok at writing funny stories, but that when I wrote about politics or technology it was boring as ass to read, mostly because I tried to make it sound like I was some kind of expert on politics or history.…