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Osaka Station City fountain

September 14, 2011
via youtube.com

This is making the rounds, so I might as well contribute. Beautiful (and maybe not so hard to do - it's much like a dot-matrix printer, but printing from bottom up). I saw one of these a few years ago at the Motor Show in Geneva (at the Jeep stand), but it was much lower resolution and much less creative.

Installing cfengine on Mac OS X

August 5, 2011

Cfengine (tested 3.2.0) installs easily on OS X (tested 10.7), given that it's Unix. One problem I encountered was that it does not compile with the bundled version of Berkeley DB (it recognizes it during configure, but produces compilation errors). The solution is to use some other DB engine. I chose Tokyo Cabinet. Using homebrew, the process is simple

brew install tokyo-cabinet

After this, configure --with-tokyocabinet, and then compile and install as usual.

Emacs - Multiple columns one buffer - Stack Overflow

July 23, 2011
Follow mode is a minor mode that makes two windows, both showing the same buffer, scroll as a single tall “virtual window.” To use Follow mode, go to a frame with just one window, split it into two side-by-side windows using C-x 3, and then type M-x follow-mode. From then on, you can edit the buffer in either of the two windows, or scroll either one; the other window follows it. In Follow mode, if you move point outside the portion visible in one window and into the portion visible in the other window, that selects the other window—again, treating the two as if they were parts of one large window.
via stackoverflow.com

Very useful, and something I didn't know about.

My thoughts about the Lion upgrade process

July 22, 2011

I just finished upgrading our Mac (my wife and I share it) to Lion. It looks very nice. This has been the OS X upgrade to which I have given less thought: purchase, download, backup, install, done.

I think a lot of this has to do with the online distribution. We are used to installing things downloaded from the Internet without much thought (of course there are security considerations, but that's another topic). On the other hand, new OS versions used to be special: you go to the store, or you order it online, it comes in a box, and there used to be an ominous feeling about it. It may wipe all your data, it may make your machine unrecognizable, it may kill your pets.
image from Karate Exam

Karate Exam

July 2, 2011

P724
Today I had my 2nd-Kyu Karate exam. I passed! This is my first exam after having abandoned karate for 10 years and coming back to training 5 months ago, so I'm very happy that it went well. Here's the "after" photo. I am the one with the headband (and yes, I am the oldest in the group other than my Sensei).