Short items (#2)

• Spanish having accented letters, it is very easy to get misspelt artist names in Last.fm, and since Last.fm doesn’t do auto-correction for them (only for track titles), you end up with two different pages for a given artist. If you’re an elitist, refrain from enjoying music from artists whose misspelt name has more listeners than the correct one (and good luck).

• The “automatic formatting” feature in Vim is rather useful, since you can edit text mid-paragraph and have it automatically “flow” to the desired line length, like word processors do. I wish, however, it was context sensitive (but I guess only Emacs must be able to do that): using it for e-mail or LaTeX sucks because then you must deactivate it when editing the headers or the preamble. But, alas, a shortcut for easy activation/deactivation is a mess, because there’s no toggling for multi-valued, comma-separated options in Vim AFAICS. (The shortcut can be done, though.)

• I’ve watched recently the two late talks by Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who passed away in 2008 due to pancreatic cancer. These are Time Management and, of course, The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. I was profoundly impressed, for I found him to be really, really inspiring. Once I recover from that, I’ll watch them again and take notes. (Interestingly enough, he was an Unitarian Universalist.)

• The stupid riddle in last week’s items was simply a list of middle names for some well-known people (Knuth, Raymond, Stallman, Torvalds and Dijkstra). The addendum was Icaza’s second surname.

• I’m rather fond of top-posting in private correspondence, since I see little value in replying inline and only in few occasions quoting really makes a difference. I prefer my private correspondence, particularly if not technical, to be snail mail-like, with each reply standing on its own. (In that case, it is of course one’s responsibility to ensure you don’t overlook in your reply any of the topics or questions in the original text.)