Dealing With Inappropriate Behavior

I just saw someone in a community I moderate say “Adria Richards should go back in the kitchen.” I asked them to give me a reason why I should not remove them from the community for that, and they explained they were pardoying the harassment. Looking through the log again I found that that was a plausible explanation based on the context, so I said “thank you,” they smiled, and all was well.

Except, then someone completely unrelated jumped at me with “freedom of speech,” how “oppressing people” like that is “retarded” etc.

Typo.el 1.1 Released

I just released version 1.1 of typo.el, an Emacs extension for typographic editing. This version marks the typo-language variable as safe local variable, meaning the language can be set on a file-specific basis using file-local variables. It also adds support for Russian quotation marks and

typo.el is available from github or via package-install from Marmalade.

Income Tax law (There, I Fixed It)

With recent discussions on changes to the German income tax law, especially regarding the splitting regulation for couples and families, I grow continuously frustrated at politicians’ inability to simplify the tax code. And it could be so easy.

Elpy 0.9 Released

I’m happy to announce that I just released a new version of Elpy, the Emacs Python Development Environment. You can find a list of news since the last release below.

Health Care Law (There, I Fixed It)

A while back I described the reasons on why universal health care is inevitable in a modern society. The main point therein is that we can not in a modern society let people die due to sickness simply because they are not rich enough to afford the appropriate health care. The question then becomes not whether society should pay in these cases, but how society can set up these payments to be as efficient as possible while not burdening any single member of the society overly much.

In this post, I’ll explain a health care system I would like to see in Germany, and one which I think would work well elsewhere, too.

Circe 1.1 released

Version 1.1 of Circe, the Client for IRC in Emacs, has been released.

Read more about Circe on its homepage: https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/circe/wiki

Circe is available from Marmalade.

Changes

• If a user leaves the channel and rejoins within a short time under the same nick, Circe will now remember the active/lurker state of that user.
• Circe now can also set a user as "lurker" again if they haven't been speaking for a while. This is disabled by default. See circe-active-users-timeout for more information.
• The heuristic to identify whether lisp symbol in the channel buffer is a function or a variable has slightly improved.
• The variable tracking-ignored-buffers allows functions in addition to regular expressions now.
• Newer versions of bitlbee are now supported out of the box.
• Additionally, there were various bugfixes.

Thanks to Taylan Ulrich B and John Foerch for their contributions. Circe wouldn't be where it is without you.

When Jokes Cross the Line

A while back, I heard someone say that rape jokes are important and we should not oppose them, because jokes are how we deal with traumatic situations. That sounded like an interesting argument, so I figured I’d think a bit more about it.