Listing available monospace fonts in Emacs

After finding out that the Monospace font doesn't support italics, I set about trying to find a suitable replacement. This EmacsWiki page lists a way to print some example text in all of the fonts on the system, which is very helpful for comparing what's available. The problem with it is that it displays all fonts, not just the monospace fonts, which isn't useful. (For those of you not in the know, all programming is done with monospace or uniform-width fonts, meaning that l and m are the same size).

Use FileMaker Web Publishing in Apache

I've been tasked with nice-ifying the configuration and setup of the systems at work. They store a huge amount (244 GiB) of protein analysis data in a FileMaker database and have PHP scripts accessing the data through the FileMaker XML HTTP API. The problem is that the PHP scripts are running on Apache (as is an SVN repo), but FileMaker wants to publish its API only through IIS. Having spent more than a minute wrestling with configuring IIS, I want it out of my life ASAP. But that can't be done unless scripts have a way of talking XML to FileMaker on port 80. All hope seemed lost.

When European "Austerity" Isn't

I've been skeptical of the rhetoric that there has been "brutal, crushing austerity" in Europe. When these claims are made, I have seldom heard any quantification of how brutal these "brutal" changes have been. So I looked it up.

Short version: there's been minimal to negative austerity since pre-meltdown 2008.

Longer version:

Solving mod_dav_svn loading faliure on Apache in Windows

Yesterday, I spent way too much time trying to get Subversion working under Apache in Windows 7. I really have a new appreciation for GNU/Linux package managers; what would have been sudo aptitude install libapache2-svn under Ubuntu turned into hours of staring at Syntax error on line 270 of C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf/httpd.conf: Cannot load C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/modules/mod_dav_svn.so into server: The specified procedure could not be found.

Metaphor for Europe's Troubles

Based on my decades of experience in the sovereign debt markets, I have come up with a perfect metaphor for what is going on in the Eurozone. It is as if the Grace government promised 200,000 people one boat each, but now that the boats are due, it turns out that she doesn't have 200,000 boats anywhere, there are only 100,000. Grace tries telling half of the people not to try to use their boat; to pretend that it is sitting in a port somewhere, waiting for them. If some people use their boat half of the week, other people can use it for the other half of the week, so it is "like" having 200,000 boats. Uncle Jeremy has 1.5 million boats, but he isn't so thrilled about just handing over a bunch of his boats to Grace, who knew she promised more than she had. Jeremy says "I'll give you 50,000 of my boats, but only if you tell 50,000 people that they aren't getting a boat at all." Grace is furious, shouting "you're forcing boat austerity on me! I need to implement boat-growth policies!" Of course, "boat-growth policies" is a euphemism for "Jeremy gives me more boats."

EA support is wonderful

I contacted EA support today to get my reward for participating in last weekend's Mass Effect 3 Bounty Weekend: Operation Shieldwall. I achieved the individual goal, but didn't get the priiiize, so I went to EA for help. Maybe 10 minutes later, it was done. Thank you to "Larry S" for helping me. Here is the log of my chat with him; I want to give credit where credit is due for his professionalism and speed.

Simple recursive file traversal in Elisp

Really quick: I wrote a simple bit of elisp to eval a body over each of the files in a directory, recursively. Looking around for a little bit, I found a couple of options, including Findr, which has its own queue implementation (pretty short), and whose main function is a whopping 55 lines!