When technology goes on strike

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting:

Amazing but true
When I’d finished this article, I wanted to spell check the content. emacs-ispell mode decided to go on strike. It could not find aspell, the program that I use for spelling checking.

My emacs spell checker has worked faithfully on this machine for several years. And just when I complain that I spend half my life fixing things that shouldn’t be broken the emacs spell checker decides to break.

I don’t believe in malicious Gods, nor that the laws of physics are different in the left-hand corner of the sofa in my front room where I’m typing this, though there is circumstantial evidence to suggest the contrary.

I could see no reason why my spelling checker should break – Everything is fine, I have changed nothing. Well I have installed a new version of Erlang and installed Julia and written some lecture notes since I last spell checked a document.

Fortunately eleven minutes with the Google casino worked. The second suggestion of how to fix my problem worked – and I still don’t know why emacs could not find aspell – and life is too short to find out why.

I guess there are some things we’ll just never know.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://joearms.github.io/2014/02/07/why-programming-is-difficult.html
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