Celsius1414

Yesterday, BBC2 broadcast a Newsnight program on the story behind Vladimir Nabokov’s last unpublished novel, The Original of Laura. I’m hoping it’ll show up on BBC America or become otherwise accessible.

From “Nabokov’s final literary striptease”:

Nabokov made his wife Vera promise him on his deathbed that the manuscript would go the same way as Bryon’s diaries [i.e., burned].

The book never appeared, and the world was entitled to think that it had read the entire corpus of the dazzling stylist.

But Vera Nabokov never fulfilled her husband’s last wish. She agonised about what to do with the incomplete novel, while it gathered dust in the vaults of a Swiss bank.

She could not bring herself to commit the manuscript to the flames. On her own death, the burden passed to the Nabokovs’ only child, Dmitri.[…]

But it seems he could no more resolve the dilemma of Nabokov’s last book than could his mother.

With the decision to go ahead and publish it, something of a controversy has arisen, with various authors coming down on one side or the other. While I can understand and sympathize with those who want the author’s wish fulfilled, I am jealous of losing any of VVN’s work. Particularly when Dmitri has this to say:

“My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn’t name a book one intends to destroy.”

By Jason Corso. Updated earlier this year to work with Leopard.

Vi Input Manager

This bundle patches the Cocoa Text System to add a Vi-like command mode. After entering command-mode (typically, by hitting escape in Vi), ordinary Vi commands can be typed and the text field will be updated accordingly. Essentially, this add Vi command functionality (albeit a small subset) to any (and all) text editors that use the Cocoa text system; e.g., Safari, TeXShop, XCode, etc. Note, however, this does not work for other programs that do not use the Cocoa system.

As mentioned in the previous post, Word War vi is a retro arcade game along the lines of Defender or Stargate, allowing you to play out the Emacs vs Vim wars in all their nostalgic glory. It’ll run on Mac OS X, but it takes a bit of preparation. Here’s what I did to get it running on Leopard (10.5.5); your mileage may vary on older OS versions. Also, I don’t have a joystick to test, so I am unsure if that will work or not.

1. Download and unarchive wordwarvi
2. First up, make sure you have XTools installed, which you’ll find on your Leopard install DVD. You’ll also need the X11.app found in your Applications/Utilities folder, but that is likely already there.
3. Next, install MacPorts. This will make it very simple to install the next two packages.
4. Once MacPorts is installed, go to the Terminal and type sudo port install libvorbis (you’ll need to enter your password).
5. Repeat the process with sudo port install portaudio
6. Lastly, we need to specify where a particular file is found on your system. Inside the wordwarvi folder, there are two text files to edit: ogg_to_pcm.c and wordwarvi.c

In both files, near the top, you’ll find a line that reads:

#include <malloc.h>

Change it to read:

#include <malloc/malloc.h>

And that’s all the preparatory steps. In the wordwarvi folder via the Terminal, type make. It will compile shortly, and then (assuming everything went well), you’ll only have to enter ./wordwarvi to play it via X11.app.

You might want to turn the volume down on your Mac to start with — the music was pretty loud on my system.

Thanks to Stephen Cameron for the great game!

A couple of days ago, Slashdot posted a story asking about “(Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks?”:

So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old ‘write’ command (as I’ve been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn’t know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there’s probably lots of things like that, and likely things I’ve never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there have been over 2200 comments exploring the arcana of the Unix and Unixy command line. A lot of awesome lore to check out.

Yesterday came the next story, “(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks?”:

I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what’s out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?

570+ comments later, there’s a lot to check out there as well.

Today’s post was inevitable, “(Stupid) Useful Emacs Tricks?”:

Since the Vi version of this question was both interesting and popular, let’s hear from the other end of the spectrum. What are your favorite tricks, macros, extensions, and techniques for any of the various Emacs? Myself, I like ‘M-x dunnet’ ;-)

200 comments and counting.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the Vim story, apart from the various spiffy command tips and tricks, were links to other sites. Here are a couple, along with a few related others I’ve linked to before.

• Best Vim Tips (Wikia) (at the Vim Tips Wiki)
• Efficient Editing With vim
• GTD with Vim
• Vimperator - Firefox add-on that makes the browser look and feel like vim.
• Word War vi - “A retro styled side scrolling shoot’em up arcade game for linux. Your mission is to traverse core memory and rid the host of emacs.” (See my followup post “Compiling Word War vi on Mac OS X”.)
• 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 - Bram Moolenaar on Google Video. (PDF of the presentation.)

Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine travel to some of the most remote places on earth in search of animals on the edge of extinction. Follow the journey online through exclusive video and blogs.

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