Posts Tagged ‘editor’

John McCarthy Creator and Father of Modern Artificial Intelligence and Lisp programming language creator passed away at 84

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

John McCarthy Creator of Lisp programming language and Invetor of modern Artificial Intelligence

Yesterday night, one more Computer Genius – John McCarthy has passed away at the age of 84.
John McCarthy is mostly famous for the creation of Lisp Programming language, which was probably the most used programming language in the short past. There are plenty of corporate old iron hardwares which still run programs written in Lisp. Lisp is the language in which Richard Stallman has created his so famous EMACS text editor for GNU.

Computer Technology students, should have studied certainly Lisp in the form of Lisp Scheme.
Lisp is the the second oldest high level programming language only to be predeceded by Fortran .
Lisp gave birth to the so called Macro programming languages
and was invented by McCarthy in 1958, while he was in Massachusetts MIT university.
What is so important about Lisp is that it is de-facto the first language in the world which was written to be suitable for AI (Artificial Intelligence) researches. There is plenty of interesting information about Lisp as well as a number of forks and variations circulating for almost all the existing major operating systems nowdays.

Besides LISP creation McCarthy was in the first team who did a the first Remote Computer Chess game. The game played was among USSR and US scientists, where the moves were transferred by telegraph.
In 1972 MCCarthy was awarded with the Turing Award – (Today probably the most prestigious award for incredible technology achievements in the world).
McCarth’s home website had a lot of great papers on programming languages, mathematical theory of computation and most importantly philosophical words and notes on Artificial Intelligence
His site has a lot of his essays as well as his personal views on the world and predictions (foreseen probabilities by him) on the world future.
McCarthy had even written a short Sci-Fi story (The Robot and The Baby), the story aim was to explore the question, whether robots should have simulated emotions.John McCarthy AI later days life picture

John McCarthy is among the brightest computer genius who ever live on this planet as well as a true “icon” for a computer hacker. The news for his death is quite shocking especially after the sudden death of the creator of C programming Language and UNIX Denis Ritchie , and a week earlier the pass of Steve Jobs
It seems like no coincidence, that the brightest computer minds are departuring this life, probably God is taking them one by one just like he gave them the gifts to invent and revolutionize the technology we use today.
Surely McCarthy has left a huge landmark on technology and his name will be in the books for the generations to come.

A full-featured cool post editor like MS-Word for WordPress Blogs (FCKEditor)

Friday, March 11th, 2011

I have recently installed a new blog for my younger sister and thus am establishing a number of handy plugins to make her blog more convenient for writting posts etc.

The default text editor embedded with the default wordpress install is very unflexible and thus I looked around on the net for good substitutes which will enable my sis to feel a bit like using MS-Word.

The plugin that “made the day” was FCKEditor . The installation of the FCKEditor plugin is just like any other easy to install wordpress plugin and in newer wordpress installations for instance in ver. 3.1 it can be searched directly online and installed with 2 simple clicks.
After the plugin succesful installation I enabled it and voilla, that was all. The plugin automatically overwritted the default wordpress html editor and added up a dozen of edit buttons like you can see in the screenshot below:

wordpress fsckeditor screenshot

Change mc (midnight commander) editor to mcedit / How to make mcedit default editor for mc once again / Change Debian Default editor the correct way

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

I’m considering to use mc (midnight commander) to review some dozens of source files in php/css and Java. However currently on my Debian Lenny I have configured vim to be the default editor in the system. The way I’ve setupped my vim to be the default editor is not really canonical, I mean I did it through $EDITOR variable in my /root/.bashrc and my ~/.bashrc file. In other words I have:

export VISUAL='vim'
export EDITOR='vim'

in my .bashrc files.
Though the correct way to do that is actually either by:

hipo@noah:~# update-alternatives --config editor

or through by linking /etc/alternatives/editor to your vim for instance:

hipo@noah:~# rm -f /etc/alternatives/editor
hipo@noah:~# ln -sf /usr/bin/vim /etc/alternatives/editor

As a result of my non-canonical ways to do things on the Debian as whenever I tried opening files with midnight commander (mc), files ended opening with vim.
I have to note that really sux a lot and therefore I hurried up to change mc’s behaviour back to normal.
Here is how:

While in mc press F9 and go to the Options menu, then navigate to Configuration
Now tick on the text reading: use internal edIt
afterwards it might be also a good idea to select Save Setup from the Options in order to save changed settings for future use.