in Ukiah, at friend's wedding

[Kragen Sitaker]

Bea & I are up in Ukiah this weekend for her friend's wedding.  Friday
night is for the pre-wedding dinner.  (I think calling it a "rehearsal
dinner" is a monstrosity.)

Just heard some incredibly raunchy jokes from folks here at the
dinner.

Learning interesting things about Emacs day by day, even though I've
been using it for nearly ten years (and I used Epsilon for years
before that).  Recently I learned about Alt+C, Alt+L, and Alt+U, which
turn the next word into titlecase, lowercase, and uppercase,
respectively, moving the cursor past it.  Very convenient for quick
edits to sentences.  Tonight I learned about Control+W when you're
doing an incremental search.  It adds the next word following the
cursor (or the currently found incremental search result) to the
search string; this is handy if you're looking for the next occurrence
of the identifier your cursor is on, or if you're looking for
"sheepskin" in a buffer full of "sheers" --- Control+S sh and another
Control+S or two might take you to the first "sheepskin", after which
you can use Control+W to indicate that was what you wanted, so find
more of the same.

And then there's Control+Alt+L, which switches to the last buffer you
were in; until tonight, I'd used Control+X B Enter to do that, which
is much less convenient.  And Control+Alt+S, which does an incremental
search --- by regular expression.

And a while back, I learned about Alt+@, which selects by words, and
Alt+Y, which lets you paste in things you'd cut several cuts ago.  And
then there's filladapt, which makes paragraph filling work better ---
dunno why it's not on by default.

(I'm not using Emacs terminology and orthography here, which, no
doubt, somebody will be unhappy about.)

I wrote a full-text indexing system the other night; I discovered that
ReiserFS in Linux 2.4.13 is still rather amazingly slow on my laptop.
After I had a few tens of thousands of small files in one directory, I
could only create more of them at a rate of perhaps 50-150 per second,
writing tens of kilobytes to the disk per second.  I wonder if there's
some option I forgot to turn off or something.  The indexing system
was still competitive in speed with what I've heard Lucene can do ---
my 366MHz laptop can index about 30 kilobytes per second.  I still
need to add some features before it's ready for release, though, and I
think I can double its speed.

I did the Dr. Dobb's weekly Python-URL last week, and people seemed to
be pretty happy with the results.  I'll do it again this week.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
What we *need* is for some advanced off-world sentience to carpet nuke planet
Earth from high orbit.  Call it Equal Opportunity Ethnic Cleansing.  I mean,
racism is so petty.  Why play favorites?  -- RageBoy