History as revealed by Google Ngrams, I: UNIX

UNIX was apparently really first discovered in the 18th century, about fifty years before the American War of Independence. However, it wasn't until the 20th century that it gained wide-spread use, when it was repopularised by AT&T.

Source: Google Ngram Viewer.

Vote for Emacs and Conkeror in the 2011 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards

Vote for Emacs in the Text Editor of the Year category and in the IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year category.

Vote for Conkeror in the Browser of the Year category.

Emacs user at work

Despite being designed by a Vim user, and despite its implied criticism of Emacs, I still enjoyed this image:

ashawley in the comments below points out the similarity with the 1981 cover of the EMACS Manual:

rms on apple and brain scans

On his RSS stream, Richard Stallman posted the following item:

Some Apple addicts truly worship that company, suggest brain scans.
That must be why they allow it to abuse them so much and don't care.

I know a number of Apple fans, and they do tend to have strongly favourable attitudes towards Apple products. (Apple things generally seem to be superior to Microsoft things, but the Apple company doesn't seem any less evil than Microsoft, and Linux is generally superior to both anyway.)

But I question whether this is a reaction which is actually specific to Apple fans. I imagine my brain scans might show similar reactions to GNU/Linux and Emacs.... (Most Windows/Microsoft users probably wouldn't show similar results, given that it's really just the "default" nowadays.)

Emacs in Tron

JT Nimoy discusses the creation of software art for creating visual effects in the film Tron: Legacy. Additionally, he mentions that:

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

Links:
(1) The original article/post by JT Nimoy
(2) On jwz's blog
(3) On boingboing
(4) On reddit

Tip: Showing blocked syntactic movement in LaTeX with tikz(-qtree)

Minimal example showing how to indicate blocked/illegal syntactic movement in LaTeX using the tikz and tikz-qtree packages.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{tikz-qtree}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[baseline,description/.style={fill=white,inner sep=2pt}]
  \Tree [.A [.B \node(b){b}; ] [.C c [.D d [.E e [.F f [.G g [.H \node(h){h}; ]]]]]]]
  \draw [dashed, ->, bend left] (h) to node [description] {\LARGE $\times$} (b);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Thanks to Andy Lücking and Alexis Dimitriadis from the Ling-TeX mailing list.

Tip: let Synaptic handle updates to Buuf icon set

If you want the synaptic package manager to keep your Buuf icons up-to-date, you can do so by using the Ubuntu Satanic Edition repository, as follows:

1) add the secure key; in terminal enter:

wget -q http://ubuntusatanic.org/ubuntu-se-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

2) add the following repository to your system (you could go to Go System->Administration->Software Sources->Other Software->Add and enter the following APT line:), choose the appropriate version (the following assumes you're using Ubuntu Maverick 10.10):

deb http://ubuntusatanic.org/hell maverick main

3) then in the terminal add the Buuf package by entering:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install buuf-icon-theme