Author: Marc

Help me write a song parody

I had the idea a few weeks ago, shortly after posting about how I dislike the song "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt, of writing parody lyrics and then whipping out the guitar and doing a little recording of it for fun. I started...

GeneralLispProgramming

Feeling Lispy

Lately I've been reading a lot of stuff that praises Lisp. Stuff along the lines of: Learning Lisp (in particular, reading "The Little Schemer") will magically make you a better programmer. (Question: What if I buy the book and...

GeneralMac

Mapping Alt in OS X X11.app to Emacs Meta

Thanks to a comment at this macosxhints post, I've not got the Alt key mapped to Meta in Emacs. defaults write com.apple.x11 swap_alt_meta -boolean true and then restart X11.app. Voila!...

Mac

Solving Emacs X protocol errors on OS X

Thanks to Eric Mercer, I solved the problem I had in OS X X11 with Emacs where Emacs would launch, but trying to invoke any sort of popup menu made it crash with X protocol error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) on protocol...

General

RiSE: The Amazing Climbing Robot

Cool and creepy. RiSE: The Amazing Climbing Robot

General

The Oscars: The Female Super Bowl

It occurred to me today that the Academy Awards (the Oscars) are basically the American female's Super Bowl. Many women look forward to the Oscars the way men look forward to the Super Bowl. It's an occasion to have parties. It's...

Python

The Python Tourist

Over at boodebr.org, there's a new series called "The Python Tourist". It's meant to be a series that highlights programming pitfalls in Python and from the first installment, "Passing Mutable Objects as Default Args", it looks...