Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Thu, 05 Jan 2006

Donate miles to families of injured troops

It really gripes me when people like me are accused of not supporting troops overseas when in fact it's the government's poor planning and execution of post-war reconstruction that we don't support. (Not to mention the stinginess when it comes to troop and veteran benefits.) So when I heard about a program to donate frequent-flier miles to benefit the troops and their families, I did. Unfortunately, of the three airlines I fly, the only one still accepting donations (Northwest) is the one I had the least miles on. Apparently everyone else heard about this long ago. If you haven't, now you have, and I urge you to donate. Get a jump on next Christmas's charitable rush.

## Posted at 08:59 in category /misc [permalink] [top]

Aquamacs

When I finally upgraded to Mac OS X Tiger, my old Emacs broke again. I hunted around for a replacement, tried a couple, and settled on Aquamacs. It has a few glitches, but it not only works like Emacs should, it also does a surprisingly decent job of acting Maclike. Some things I like:

• It has the expected Emacs keystrokes, but the Apple key can also be used for normal Mac actions. Apple-O opens a new file, Apple-W closes the current buffer, etc. (You can use the Option key as Emacs's Meta modifier, but I've never been able to undo the 20-year-old hardwiring that has me typing ESC.)

• By default, marking a region highlights it. As in other Mac apps, typing then replaces the highlighted region. I thought I would hate that, but I actually like it better than the old behavior (which is still available). But you must know that CTL-G undoes the highlighting!

• Emacs yank (CTL-W), put (CTL-Y), and related actions are independent of the system clipboard, which you get to with Apple-C, Apple-V, etc. I was surprised by how well that fits with some of my common workflows.

It's good enough that I dropped a donation on its author.

## Posted at 08:58 in category /mac [permalink] [top]