Farewell, Chemisa

We've known this was coming for a while, but that doesn't make it any easier.

This afternoon we had a vet come by the house and put down Chemisa.



Chemisa (we never really decided on a spelling for her name...), like all of our cats, was a foundling; Katy and the kids brought her home from Santa Fe some 15 years ago. She was never an especially friendly cat, but she mellowed a bit in her old age, and has slept with Katy and me for years.

She was initially an indoor-outdoor cat; our attempts to keep her in would cause her to start peeing outside the cat box. As she got older, she stopped going out in the winter, and after a run-in with another critter that resulted in a nasty, infected bite, she finally relented and stayed inside. After a period of stand-off-ishness she eventually accepted Willin and Ditz, and the three of them would sometimes curl up together.

Back in August Chemisa began to lose her appetite, and for the past few weeks she's been losing weight. Having seen what Willin went through to get to his diabetes diagnosis, we we decided we just couldn't do that with Chemisa and elected instead to put her down. Katy found a vet who would make a house call, and this afternoon, at about 1:30PM, Chemisa died, peacefully and quietly, in my lap, with Willin, Katy and RuthAnne next to her.

She's buried in the garden beneath a new tree. I'll update this next spring when it blooms.



Thank you, Chemisa, for being part of our family.

Emacs and Windows

My new job is forcing me, at long last, to embrace Windows as my primary development environment. As a result, I'm finally putting some real effort into getting emacs, complete with shell buffers, working well on Windows.

Here, as far as I can reconstruct it, is what I've done.

• Download md5sums for Windows, so I can verify the MD5 checksums on other software I download.
• Download and install keytweak, so I can remap the $#@ Caps Lock key to be a control key.
• Add a HOME environment variable to the Windows environment. I've set this to C:\Documents and Settings\mylogin\My Documents, in an effort to be as natively Windows-ish as possible. Note that this will affect the location of things like the emacs initialization directory (.emacs.d) and bash initialization files (.bashrc).
• Download and install emacs for Windows. Now I have an editor; I plunked a bare-bones init.el into $HOME/.emacs.d to get me going. It looks like this:

;; electric buffers
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-b"    'electric-buffer-list)

;; completion
(dynamic-completion-mode)

;; start the server 
(server-start)

;; font lock
(global-font-lock-mode t)

;; Don't store tabs. 
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)

• Download and install Cygwin/X. My reasoning here is that I'm bound to need an X11 server at some point, and this gives me enough of the entire Cygwin system (including bash, grep, find, etc.) to get started. I also added RCS (for super-easy source control for init files, etc.).

Now the main pieces are installed, but there's a lot of customization left to do. In particular, emacs shell buffers are lame; they run the Windows shell, not bash, and directory tracking doesn't work.

The next steps I acquired from Henry Kautz, specifically his page Using Emacs and Bash or Csh under MS Windows. I confess, this is essentially a black box for me, but it works like a charm. I added this to $HOME/.bashrc:

# directory tracking (from http://henrykautz.org/Computers/using_the_gnu_development_enviro.htm)

alias cd=cdpwd
function cdpwd {
'cd' "$1"
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
} 
alias pushd=pushdpwd
function pushdpwd {
'pushd' "$1"
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
} 
alias popd=popdpwd
function popdpwd {
'popd'
echo "Working directory is $(cygpath -wa .)"
}

I preceded these lines with a bit of path setup; this will no doubt vary based on your needs:

# Set up a vaguely useful path, in the context of an emacs shell. Thils will NOT have
# a bunch of standard Windows stuff on it.

cygdirs=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
tcldirs=/cygdrive/c/Tcl/bin
windirs=/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem
cmakedirs=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/CMake\ 2.6/bin
emacsdirs=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/GNUmacs/emacs-23.1/bin/

export PATH=$cygdirs:$tcldirs:$cmakedirs:$emacsdirs:$windirs

Then I added this to $HOME/.emacs.d/init.el:

(defun my-shell-setup ()
"For bash (cygwin 18) under Emacs 20"
(setq comint-scroll-show-maximum-output 'this)
(setq comint-completion-addsuffix t)
(setq comint-eol-on-send t)
(setq comint-file-name-quote-list '(?\  ?\"))
(setq w32-quote-process-args ?\")
(make-variable-buffer-local 'comint-completion-addsuffix)
(setq shell-dirstack-query "cygpath -w `dirs`")
(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'perfect-track-directory nil t)
(add-hook 'comint-output-filter-functions 'comint-strip-ctrl-m nil t)
)

(defun perfect-track-directory (text)
(if (string-match "\\w*Working directory is ||\\([^|]+\\)||" text)
(cd (substring text (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1)))))

(setq shell-mode-hook 'my-shell-setup)
(setq process-coding-system-alist (cons '("bash" . undecided-unix)
process-coding-system-alist))
(setq exec-path (cons "C:/cygwin/bin" 
(cons "C:/cygwin/usr/bin" (cons "C:/cygwin/usr/local/bin" exec-path))))
(setenv "PATH" (concat "C:\\cygwin\\bin;C:\\cygwin\\usr\\bin;C:\\cygwin\\usr\\local\\bin" 
(getenv "PATH")))
(setq shell-file-name "bash")
(setenv "SHELL" shell-file-name) 
(setq explicit-shell-file-name shell-file-name)
(cd "~")

Now M-x shell creates a fully-functional bash shell, with directory tracking enabled. Sweet!

While customizing .bashrc I ran into a little problem with line endings; I configured Cygwin to use Unix-style line endings (LF, or \n), but emacs by default creates files with DOS line endings (CR LF, or \r\n). Bash doesn't like this. Saving a text file in emacs on Windows to have Unix line endings is done via C-x <enter> f unix <enter>.

"Give yourself to the Dark Side."

Oh, and speaking of the dark side: Those ugly white-on-black command windows can be customised to be a bit less depressing. There's a "colors" tab in the properties menu of the command window, and you can save the preferences for subsequent sessions.

Paranoid Nation

Today's New York Times has an article about kids walking to school by themselves. My kids, being homeschooled, didn't face this specific conundrum, but we did allow them to start taking the T and walking places unescorted at pretty young ages - and we definitely faced disapproval from other parents about this. Fear of abduction is one of the most oft-cited reasons for not allowing children to walk places.

This little pair of facts is embedded in the story; I wish it had been a bit more prominent.

Critics say fears that children will be abducted by strangers are at a level unjustified by reality. About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents.

The Federal Highway Administration has a program to encourage walking and biking to school, with suggestions on how to improve safety for pedestrians and bikers, and ways to allay parental fears. For the sake of our children, I hope it succeeds.