Josh and Jessica have both made blog entries from our Special Libraries Association panel today. I'm just jumping on the bandwagon!

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A remarkable collection of links on User Experience topics.

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How Microsoft tests ASP.NET 2.0. Hint: it involves 105,000 automated test cases, which are run on 1200 dedicated machines.

ASP.NET is probably the best web development framework out there—at least for the corporate market. This is one reason why; not a lot of companies other than Microsoft can invest that much in quality.

(After writing, Shimon checks the back of his neck. Hmm, no chip.)

Frassle has a lot of different stuff in it. I'm searching for a short explanation that explains the unifying themes. Here's attempt #1:

Frassle is an interpersonal content management system—a connection point for conversations you're engaged in. It is designed to help you find relevant discource, participate in it, and share it with others.

All of this is made possible by the content of your blog and other blogs that hook into frassle via RSS. Frassle's aggregator helps you follow news sources you care about. Your blog collects thoughts (soon including private ones). Throughout, frassle threads each post in context—whether it's a comment, a response in a frassle blog, or a response aggregated from an external source. Finally, the frassle content studio lets you build dynamic web pages and RSS feeds that present content from sources you choose.

None of frassle's functions are brand new, but the coherent way that these functions are integrated is new.

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A huge colleciton of jokes from hundreds of commentors and the yeti himself.

Q: Why can't engineers tell jokes timing?

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Handy mono program for stitching together digital panorama images.

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Philip Greenspun's classic, originally published in the ArsDigita Systems Journal.

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Launched in October 2001, www.tshirthell.com is the most visited t-shirt website on the Internet. The site averages over 75,000 unique visitors and over 400,000 page views daily (source Alexa.com).

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Toph wondered why I, a Debian GNU/Linux lover through and through, would be bitching about a Fedora Core 2 issue.

The server that hosts frassle is a dedicated machine running FC2. Unfortunately, my provider didn't offer Debian. But did you know they now have apt-get for fedora? With that little perk, it's keeping me pretty happy.

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I have been annoyed that emacs21 on a fedora core 2 machine keeps asking me:

(This file) does not end in newline. Add one?

Of course I don't want to add one. If I wanted to add a new line I'd just hit Alt-Shift-. Enter like every sane person. Right? Shut up, emacs.

OK, simple enough. Just set require-final-newline to nil. Just put that setting into my .emacs file.

This didn't work: (setq require-final-newline nil)

This also didn't work: (setq-default require-final-newline nil)

Using emacs' own customization system, it still didn't work. I could set the variable in a session, but after quitting and starting again the setting didn't stick.

I started to worry. Then I tracked it down.

The non-nil setting comes from /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el. This apparently runs after your .emacs and, on FC2, sets require-final-newline to 'query. So to stop this atrocity, you have two options:

• Become root, and edit /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el.
• Avoid running this silly default.el file by putting into your .emacs:
  (setq inhibit-default-init t)

I chose the latter option. Perhaps this post will help future Google searchers do the right thing even faster.