This is an off-topic post. I don't like to do OT, but this is the first and last post from my brand new math category to be posted also as an Emacs entry. A little bit of math doesn't hurt.

Have you ever wonder why does really mean the e constant? You know, besides the number 2.7182828? Well, I've found the best explanation here.

I've always loved math. Don't get me wrong, I'm pursuing a Computer Science BA degree, but there are some fundamental math concepts that I don't fully understand altought I use them. I used to be more insistent but I've somewhat lost that interest over the years. To try to revert this I'm starting this new "math" category on my blog.

If you have ever read the emacs-help mailing list, I'm sure you have seen this picture:

That ASCII-art box is great for many things, specially when used to describe a function, variable or key. The necesary package is boxquote. And to have all its power at your fingertips, a snippet for your .emacs

;;;_. boxquote

(require 'boxquote)

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b y")   'boxquote-yank)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b r")   'boxquote-region)         
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b u")   'boxquote-unbox-region)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b t")   'boxquote-title)          
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b i")   'boxquote-insert-file) 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b k")   'boxquote-kill) 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b s")   'boxquote-shell-command)
 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b b")   'boxquote-buffer)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b p")   'boxquote-paragraph) 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b n")   'boxquote-narrow-to-boxquote)

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b w")   'boxquote-where-is) 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b d f") 'boxquote-describe-function)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b d k") 'boxquote-describe-key)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c b d v") 'boxquote-describe-variable)

Here is the link to the gmane archive of the original message.

libnotify and notification-daemon are part of the galago project, a "desktop presence framework". libnotify shows popup windows on your desktop to alert you from some event, like new mail or an IM. I like the idea of use a single program to manage all your desktop notifications instead of having to implement the same code over and over again on all your apps. AFAIK libnotify is desktop-agnostic so it should work on GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc.

What about emacs? Well, if you use jabber.el for jabber chatting, erc or rcirc for IRC you can use libnotify to do some fancy notifications.

For erc this guy hacked the libnotify support. I haven't tested personally but seems interesting.

For rcirc there's a wiki page about rcircNotify

For jabber.el I wrote a libnotify alert, here it is the wiki page for it.

I own a AMD64 machine that includes hardware virtualization and since day 1 I wanted to take advantage of this. I tried Xen back then (almost a year ago) but it didn't convinced me, it seemed too much work for something I won't on a daily base. Then I read somewhere about kvm and how it got merged into the main kernel so quickly, how simple it was because it relies on hardware virtualization and kernel's internals for so much of the work, I got hooked.

Back then I used kvm-20 and while it worked it had a few glitches (video performance, random crashes on windows guest, erratic networking, etc.) . But fast-forwarding to 2008, kvm-62 fixes the last issue I had, video performance. Drawing grub's menu used to take around two or three seconds, but now it's instantaneous and works like charm. There's a great guide to install kvm on Gentoo here. If you have a CPU that features hardware virtualization and you want to run several instances of your favorite distro (and who doesn't?) I recommend you to give a try kvm-62