Joey Gibson’s Blog

I was first exposed to Emacs back in 1991. It took me a while to warm up to it, but I did and I have been using it ever since. Once I started using it on a regular basis, I started customizing it. You can write modules and such for it, but for simple customizations, you can just put them in a hidden file called .emacs in your home directory. As time passed, I would add various changes to my .emacs file, adding convenience functions in Lisp and other bits to make me more productive. As I changed jobs and changed computers, I always made a point of taking this file with me so I’d always have it.

When I switched from Windows to OSX in November of 2006, I didn’t immediately need Emacs, so I didn’t think to copy my .emacs file over. And once I didn’t need the Windows machine any more, I put Linux on it and turned it into a server. But guess what I forgot to do. Yep, I forgot to copy my .emacs someplace safe. I hadn’t noticed it was missing until today. I need to run Emacs for something and when I went to make a change to my .emacs file, that’s when I realized it was missing. I checked my backup drive, which has a bunch of stuff off that old PC, but my .emacs file was nowhere to be found.

Even though I haven’t used Emacs in a while, I need to now, and having that file sure would be nice. But even if I didn’t need to use Emacs right now, I’m still a bit sad to see the file go, since I carted it around for so long. Keeping one file with you for 15 years is quite a long time, wouldn’t you agree?

Yesterday, the internets were all a-flutter about Chrome, Google’s new surprise web browser. Sure, I downloaded it, like everyone else, and I was impressed by its rendering speed. I used it for a few hours without any problems at all. It works with every site I tried it with, and speedily. I’m especially juiced about the JavaScript JIT engine called V8, and the fact that each tab is its own process, separate from other tabs.

But here’s the rub: for now, it’s Windows-only. How can this be? It’s built on top of WebKit, which is Apple’s updated version of KHTML, and both run on OSX and Linux. So what gives, Google? I know they say that there will be OSX and Linux versions “soon,” but how long is that?

I found directions for building Chromium, which says on its homepage, “Google Chrome is built with open source code from Chromium.” So I downloaded all the source code and tried to build it. Here’s 2,000 words about how it went

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the official OSX release.