In my spare time, I’ve been working on two tools to make emacs more useful to me by leveraging two key features: the ability to save the desktop state and the ability to have emacs clients connect to an emacs server.

For the former, I wrote an emacs-lisp package called desktop-autosave. Once initiated, the package will periodically save the desktop under the name of your choice. The benefit of this is that you do not have to remember to save the desktop explictly yourself before you exit emacs or before you experience an emacs or system crash. Moreover, the next time you start desktop-autosave with that same name, the corresponding desktop is automatically loaded into your emacs workspace.

For the latter, I wrote a bash shell script called ee that will allow you to connect to a named emacs server (bringing up the server if it is not already running). The value of this package is that you can now invoke ee wherever you would normally have invoked emacs, and by just specifying the name of the desired server, you can easily set up as many emacs sessions as you have concurrent projects.

The real benefit comes when you use both packages together. In this case, you can use ee to bring up a named emacs server, and that server will save its desktop to disk periodically. As long as emacs stays running, you can keep connecting to the same server from as many clients as you wish. After your emacs server terminates (by exiting normally, by crashing, or by the machine being reset), you can use ee to once again bring up a server with the same name. In this case, emacs will load the automatically-saved desktop file from disk and you will have in memory all the files that you were working on previously on that particular emacs server. Nifty, no?

Feel fry to try these packages out. They are available on GitHub. If you find them useful or if you find bugs, let me know. Enjoy!

Every so often, she fields questions that describe behavior patterns that are controlling, stalking, manipulative—and sometimes outright abusive. Her answers are practical for the immediate situation, but Hax also suggests counseling to help the writer better perceive and separate from the situation, and reading Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. That book comes up time and time again in response to these types of questions, and that eventually piqued my curiosity. I just finished reading it.

De Becker, who himself had an abusive childhood, is a leading security expert whose firm has had many high- and low-profile clients and which has developed tools for the public at large. His mission in the book is to allow people to separate the false fears that we tend to focus on (because the media blows certain incidents way out of proportion) from the true fears that we often try to brush away (ignoring our feelings of unease because we want to be nice or are afraid of harshly judging others). I think everyone would be well-served by reading this book, and it’s a necessity for those whose background or circumstances place them in positions of vulnerability: those who were abused in the past, those who have not found their voice, those whose mindset is about meeting others’ expectations even at the expense of their own needs, and those who feel uneasy having to be around a co-worker who just doesn’t seem quite right.

For previews, check out de Becker’s interviews and reviews of his book.

At dinner with some guys the conversation veered to the unfathomability of womankind. “My daughter asked me to translate from Boy to Human.” “I just always say I’m sorry.” “Women say they communicate more, but when they’re upset you’re supposed to know why. Or to ask.” Lest one gender get all the blame, I see plenty of gender finger-pointing from women as well in questions to advice columnists.

Obviously, there are biological differences between the sexes. The mind being rooted in the physical brain (I’m not a dualist), it is plausible that there might be some biological difference in cognitive processes. However, my impression of the studies that I’ve read in the lay literature—and bear in mind this is a pre-filtered and pre-digested set, not at all a metastudy—is that these differences are small variations in the statistical distributions of various cognitive traits: the distributions are not identical, but there is a large overlap.

I’ll admit that I’m biased here: I start from the assumption that we are all much more alike than we are different, and I find validation for my bias in these studies that say the differences are small. If you start from the opposite camp, though, you’ll certainly find plenty of literature to support (I would say hype) the chasm between the sexes: Mars/Venus and all that.

It seems to me, though, that any attempt at communication, at relationship, at progress, needs to start from the assumption that there is common ground. Attributing breakdowns to faults of the “other team” is an easy way out and not at all productive—and, potentially, a slippery slope to (or perhaps vestiges of?) gender inequality.

Why, then, is the Battle of the Sexes so prevalent? Perhaps because gender is the difference that most of the population (straight couples looking for or already in a relationship) is facing every day. Undoubtedly because men and women, individual personality differences aside, are socialized differently. Probably, too, precisely because it is easier to generalize incompatibilities to be the out-group’s faults rather than to work out specific problem between one’s self and another individual self. And, I would wager, it’s also a way to bond within one’s own in-group. All of these seem like building blocks of sexism.

But these are more conjectures than solid conclusions based on evidence or experience. The truth of the matter is that, as a gay man observing the heterosexual ecosystem, I find it utterly baffling that males and females of the species pursue each other to establish long-term relationships, and yet find in the other gender unbridgeable faults that would, by all accounts, make daily life together a grating affliction. And yet they keep doing it, complaining and pairing off!

So I ask my straight readers: is the “battle of the sexes” such a prominent aspect of your lives? Or am I just paying too much attention to the noisy self-righteous? Am I making too much of this?

Here’s an overview of the new WordPress:

Transaction Check Error:
   package nss-softokn-3.12.4-19.fc13.x86_64 (which is newer than
   nss-softokn-3.12.4-17.fc13.i686) is already installed

The solution, which I found here, is to first do

sudo yum downgrade nss-softokn

I was eagerly awaiting Fedora 13, hoping that installing that would go off without a hitch. No such luck. The solution, as it turned out, was to try to install the problematic rpm directly and resolve the issues manually (in my case, a directory was supposed to become a symlink). But then a couple of other packages had issues, and I just decided to bite the bullet and reinstall. Luckily, my /home was in a different partition than /, so it wasn’t excruciating.

Things I needed to restore upon successful installation were

• /etc/{passwd,shadow,group,sudoers}
• mount points listed in fstabs, and links to same
• fonts
• printer, samba
• Chrome
• NX
• Picasa (still in progress due to a package dependency conflict)
• crontabs

I still like Fedora alright, but this upgrade process was painful (though possibly my fault for not cleaning around properly after mucking around in my system). I’m glad I’m on FC13; I got some cool customizations finally done, about which I’ll write later. I am, however, starting to wonder whether any of these would be easier on Ubuntu. Stay tuned…

More detailed reviews of the book can be found at The Huffington Post and at The Moderate Voice

Nasr seems to emphasize how all Muslims have this basic set of beliefs, and though some pervert them by being extremists (a la Taliban) and some forget them by being assimilated into the Western world, for the most part Muslims form one big brotherhood. While I am not an expert on Islam, what I’ve read from other sources makes this claim sound rather Pollyanish.

Still, this was an interesting (and even inspiring) read and I recommend it to anyone looking for an insider’s perspective into Islam.