[ Content | Sidebar ]

Archives for March, 2011

Officially Spring

March 20th, 2011

I declare yesterday to have been the sunniest day of the year thus far, and so was an excellent day to visit hitherto unexplored parts of Buckinghamshire. Here’s roughly where I went:

Saw lots of strange animals: a pheasant, a red kite, and a small red mammal that cannot be classified using the standard blodgett flowchart (best guess is a fox-carrot hybrid). Also stumbled across a ruined church which was a bit spooky. I later found out that it was once St James church abandoned in the 19th century. Here are some photos I took along the way:

Emacs commit message mode

March 12th, 2011

Here’s a really trivial Emacs major mode for editing Git and Mercurial commit messages: commit-msg-mode.el. It works in basically the same way as the Vim mode, highlighting the summary line, help text, etc.

To use it, put it on your load-path and add the following to your .emacs:

(autoload 'commit-msg-mode "commit-msg-mode"
  "Major mode for editing commit messages." t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("COMMIT_EDITMSG$" . commit-msg-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("hg-editor-.*$" . commit-msg-mode))

If you’re anything like me you’ll appreciate having your commit message spell-checked which you can do with:

(add-hook 'commit-msg-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (flyspell-mode t)))

Deer in the way

March 6th, 2011

Today I went for a walk near the house of my good friend and neighbour, the Queen. But the path through her garden was blocked by a herd of deer!

Later on it brightened up a bit. Here is the bridge over Virginia Water:

Virginia Water is a large man-made lake at the southern end of Windsor Great Park. It has an adjacent village of McMansions, apparently home to various celebrities and formerly General Pinochet. I felt rather out of place and so escaped as quickly as I could.