Let’s quickly review the basic rule of conjunctions: you can conjoin like grammatical entities. “I have a hammer and a nail and been to Holland” is not a legitmate conjunction.

Imagine a popular science magazing reporting on new research by claiming that “Peanut butter and jelly makes you healthy and a great sandwich” – this is approximately the same mistake. It’s not surprising, of course, but I do think it would be reasonable to count familiarity with the English language to be a minimum standard for the editor of a national magazine published in English.

The first notes some recent trends regarding what we might call legislative and direct democracy. The second describes a particular case of the same.

EDIT: I am informed by Zach Beane (see comment below) that slime can be told to recognize the .cl extension. As he says, you need to change your .emacs file to set your auto-mode-alist so it’ll recognize .cl as the exension for “common lisp” and Do the Right Stuff with those files, for example, compile them when you enter C-c C-c.

I find a good start of an explanation of assigning file associations here and a more in-depth and typically GNU-style explanation here

However, the simplest answer is to simply use the .lisp extension and get on with actually trying to learn lisp. There’s something very like Knuth’s Law of Optimizing in effect for EMACS. The first rule is: don’t. You’re here to learn lisp, or to write something, or to use a word processor. Any time you spend customizing your editor is time you’re not spent getting it to do what you need done. The second rule is, if you’ve learned enough about lisp that it’s obvious what you need to do, and you’ve become sufficiently adept at reading the GNU “documentation” that it seems to make sense to you, then go for it.

You should buy a t-shirt or 7, or else just send the guy a few bucks ’cause after all, this is the sort of guy we want to keep around.

That will be all.

Feedback from those who find this useful will of course encourage me to continue adding to this.

DocBook Reference
docbook.org – the home page for the book, and central point for many resources.
The book itself – slightly buried in that page. This is a link to the free online version, which documents DocBook 5.
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide. This is what you need to know to customize your output. For example, I didn’t want links printed in the PDF version of my documentation – I found the trick for it in a few minutes, in this book. Very handy stuff.

While I’m a free software nut, I don’t object to proprietary stuff on principle. The Oxygen editor is the tool I’m using, and it’s working pretty nicely for me.

I’ve also come across the XMLmind editor, but I haven’t tried it yet. Looks promising, though, and the personal edition is free.

More distantly related references:

The Text Encoding Initiative – handy stuff about XML, XSL, etc.

More references will be added as I come to them.

That is all.

“…the filtering of information to conform to my tastes and interests… can lead to an unwanted and undesirable condition. The term for this is ‘ignorance’.”

Amen.

A collection of stories. Not only bad, but so bad I read the whole collection, every godawful word of it, trying to find some redeeming feature. Divil a one to be found, though. Every one of the misbegotten things is a hellhole of its own, and each is worse than all the others in its own special way. Special mention goes to “The End of Larry’s Wallet” which combines multiple species of awfulness with the unfulfilled hope that there might be a a point to the whole thing – that hope is dashed, of course, and in its place we get a totally gratuitous character introduced, or rather placed on the stage, apparently for the sole purpose of killing himself. The whole thing is a dire wreckage of a thing, completely as useless as a story can get, and full of pointless authorial interjections that are apparently meant to make the story deep, but end up cranking one’s hatred of Hasak-Lowy up to a fever pitch.
If the purpose of literature is to move one to strong emotion (a questionable premise), then H-L has made literature than serves that purpose. The emotion produced is a thorough-going loathing of the author, so complete that it extends to the entire faculty of the University of Florida at Gainesville, who should have seen this coming and prevented it, by force if necessary. This is a truly terrible collection of truly awful stories by a man whose writing shames the conscience of the English language and whose plotting shows the attention span of one of an exceptionally spastic three year old. His characterization suggests to me that he scores somewhere close to the red line on the autism scale, and his dialog is so tone deaf and so grating that it suggests he’s been listening to real people talk.
The least bad of these efforts is the title story. H-L demonstrates that he doesn’t quite understand the difference between generality and profundity, and his grasp of humor only goes as far as mocking stuff he doesn’t understand, which is almost everything, but this story might have worked if he’d had an actual language in mind, or some grasp of how languages work. That might have given this story – stolen, incidentally, from a Christopher Durang play, which is probably why it made it up to “least bad” – some actual humor. As it is the jokes are cheap and empty. As, apparently, is Todd Hasak-Lowy.
Being a glass-half-full type of person, I try to look for the best in everything, and here’s what I found in this case: I have no children, so I don’t have to lie awake nights worrying that they might end up going to the University of Florida at Gainesville and having to take a class with this yutz. And that’s the best thing I can think of, having read these stories. If you choose to inflict them on yourself, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

The trouble with installing on the netbook is that there isn’t a CD drive, so you have to install from a USB stick or an external CD drive. I went with the USB stick, since it’s what I had lying around.

1) I emptied the USB drive (copied the contents to my Mac hard drive for safekeeping). I don’t know if clearing off the drive makes a difference, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt at all.

2) Making the USB drive bootable: I turned on the Lenovo, which was running XP, and went to unetbootin.sourceforge.org, downloaded and ran the unetbootin program, which magically makes a USB stick into a bootable device with the install of your choice on it. I selected 10.4 (Leperous Limpet) from the menu, and poured a cup of coffee while it fetched the disk image. When it was done, it suggested that I could now restart the machine.

Here’s where I missed a step, and where you will likely miss a step, unless you’ve done this before:
I said, sure, restart, and then I continued drinking my coffee. When I looked up, it had booted into XP, as before. This is because I had failed to change the BIOS settings when I restarted the machine.

So:
3) Change the BIOS settings to boot from the USB drive. When the machine begins to set up, you have about a second to hit the F2 key, which lets you into the BIOS setup. If you miss it, you have to restart and pay attention next time. It’ll bring you to a screenful of options. Arrow your way over to “Boot” and arrow down to the name of your USB stick. Now, you’ll assume that you can just select this and save changes and restart, but this is wrong. You have to use the F5 key to move the entry for this device up to the first position in the list, otherwise it’ll start from the first item on the list that it finds. Now you can save and restart (F10).

From here, it’s pretty easy: you’ll see a desktop with an icon labelled “Install Linux”. Start that up, and follow the instructions, then reboot.
You may want to go back into the bios and re-set the boot order, but it won’t make a lot of difference unless you plan on powering up the machine with a flash drive in the USB port.

This got Linux up and running, but I haven’t yet got the drivers for the wireless card. When I find those, I will make a posting about it and link from here.

Later:

I never did get the drivers onto that install, because it wound up having trouble even spotting the ethernet cord, so I managed to get some coding tools on it and used it to learn some lisp.
However, I’ve since put Mint 8 on it, and that was able to find and install some drivers at least. Unfortunately, it’s not finding my home network, so there’s more to be done, but there’s something to try. It might just be that drivers are newly available, and if I redo the Ubuntu install, everything will work fine. If that happens, I will update. For the moment, if you’re having trouble with wireless drivers on your netbook, try Mint and see if that works better for you.

Later Still:
installed slackware over the Christmas weekend – thanks Ryan! – but was unable to get anywhere with the configuration, so I installed the netbook remix of 10.04 on a separate partition. This time, it was able to find and install the b43 drivers: I have a netbook that talks to the world. Huzzah.

If you’re reading this to try to find out how to get a working linux intstall on an ideapad, my advice is: try 10.04. I don’t much like the “netbook edition” but it’s working. I haven’t checked whether the “real” edition has also got the trick of finding those drivers (it didn’t a few months ago), but I don’t know if I’m going to try to find out. If anyone has any luck with finding the drivers under 10.04 standard, please drop me a note so I can include it here.