January 2nd, 2009
It was cold and bleak in Minnesota. What to do with two small children, extended family visiting from disparate points, and temperatures hovering around -10 Fahrenheit?
Mall Of America, of course!
I will admit to spending not one, not two, but three full days at the mall. I walked all three levels in both directions. The perimeter is approximately 6/10 of a mile, so I managed to get a minor (if culturally and hypsometrically flat) “hike” in during my visits.
Fun and wet: riding the log chute in the amusement park. Fun and pricey: full-motion WWII dogfighting against my brother.
I have my limits, though. I will probably not want to set foot in another mall until, say, Christmas 2012. Mayans, beware.
December 23rd, 2008
When flirting with TextMate, I got used to using normal-person keyboard shortcuts for indenting (⌘-]) and outdenting (⌘-[) blocks of code.
Emacs scoffs at normal people.
In emacs, every language mode has its own peculiar notion of indentation. To make it possible to bind keys to indentation functions, indent-according-to-mode was introduced. This function looks for a buffer-local variable called indent-line-function and invokes it if found. Major mode authors know to point indent-line-function to their mode-specific indentation code.
At first blush, whoever built this mechanism appears to have neglected the equally important “outdent” feature. It’s not a surprise, though. Historically, in the world of emacs, mode-specific indent has been closer to “format this code nicely” than to “insert spaces or tabs.” Of course, we now have popular whitespace-dependent languages (Python) and markups (YAML) for which code formatting is less useful.
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