DHL delivered my ailing Powerbook back again yesterday. The hard disk has been replaced (it has a different serial number). A few hours of installing software later it seems fine (using it to write this entry).

Earlier I thought that perhaps the disk was slightly louder than the previous one, but it may just be that I'm spending a lot of time listening carefully.

The gnusintegration of dme:blogwas incorrectly generating filenames. That's fixed now.

Generating blog entry names from gnus articles currently uses the group name and the article number as input to a list of regular expression transformations. Perhaps the list of transformations should be made more automatic ? How about automatically marking the quoted mail message using blockquote?

Until the end of January Bruce Curtis is in the Watford office. Matthias and are here for one week only.

It's interesting to finally meet Bruce - we've spoken on the phone and exchanged email quite a bit over the last couple of years, but there's nothing quite like face-to-face.

Good news !

From: Bill Stivers
Subject: ANN: Pilot of Apple Products at Sun to Open!
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 22:23:29 -0800
To: Macintosh Users

It is with great pleasure that I can announce that within the next
six to eight weeks, a supported, Sun-sponsored pilot program will
be being introduced whereby select iBook and PowerBook configurations
will be available for purchase through CAMS.

...

Now to speak to "the management".

It arrived back again last Friday. In the box was a single piece of A4 which includes something to the effect "it wasn't broken, so we didn't fix it".

At least part of that is right - they didn't change the hard drive. Within 30 minutes of turning the machine back on it was making the stupid noises and hanging again.

Back on the phone to Apple support. They don't think that there's anything wrong with the machine, and have compared the noise it makes to other Powerbook G4's they have in the workshop.

All this really indicates is that they haven't heard the problem. Running through Disk First Aid's verify and repair cycle a few times, I can get the machine to the point where it claims that the disk doesn't actually exist.

They're picking it up again on Tuesday (tomorrow). This time I'll include instructions on how to reproduce the problem, including a note to the effect: "If you can't reproduce, don't just send it back - ring me on ...".

We'll see. Almost a month now since I reported the problem.

My Powerbook has gone back to Apple again. Perhaps they'll actually replace the hard drive this time.

Whilst installing the MacOS X developer tools, the disk in my Powerbook started to make silly noises again. I didn't note down the serial number of the disk before I sent the machine back, so I can't be sure that it wasn't replaced, but the noises are exactlythe same.

DHL should be here to take it away again tomorrow.

DHL delivered my Powerbook back this morning.

The worklist is confusing, to me at least. It says:

From scouting around the machine, it seems that:

Anyway, the machine works and I'm busily re-installing (including a few hundred megabytes of download).

Listening to: Cosmic Baby: Celestial Harmony

The default mode for editing textareas with emacs-w3m is pretty cheesy. No auto-fill, no spell checking, ...

Enabling the use of text-mode was a little bit more complex than I imagined, but only a little. The strangeness was caused by the use of local variables to maintain state in the textarea editing buffer. As all major-modes should, text-mode kills all local variables. This meant that the emacs-w3m state was lost and attempting to submit the modified text failed. Marking the relevant variables as permanent-local did the trick.

Here's the code:

(eval-after-load "w3m-form"
  '(progn
     (define-minor-mode dme:w3m-textarea-mode
       "Minor mode used when editing w3m textareas."
       nil " dme:w3m-textarea" w3m-form-input-textarea-keymap)

     (defun dme:w3m-textarea-hook ()
       ;; protect the form local variables from being killed by `text-mode'
       (mapcar (lambda (v)
 		 (if (string-match "^w3m-form-input-textarea.*"
				   (symbol-name (car v)))
		     (put (car v) 'permanent-local t)))
	       (buffer-local-variables))
       (text-mode) (dme:w3m-textarea-mode))

     (add-hook 'w3m-form-input-textarea-mode-hook 'dme:w3m-textarea-hook)))

Updates will probably happen on the relevant Emacs Wikipage.

Listening to: DJ Tiesto: In My Memory - Dallas 4PM

For a long time it has been my understanding that the height of the British population as a group is increasing. On that basis I'd assumed that my difficulties in acquiring trousers that are long enough would slowly die away. Based on a look around the shopping centre in Watford today, it seems that the opposite is actually the case.

I'm not thattall at around 6"4'. Any suggestions ?

Listening to: Rom and Comix: The Day After