Notepad++ and Aspell on Win7

Posted on November 17, 2011 by ehurst

Update: (28 June 2013; lots of folks still land on this blog post) Notepad++ 6.3.3 now uses DSpellCheck. The default dictionary is not US English. If you check this page (scroll down a bit) you’ll learn not only where the default dictionaries are installed, but that you can change it through the settings. That means you can put your User Dictionary file in a folder you own on Windows 7. You can find alternative dictionaries here. Download, unzip and put it either in the default location or someplace else and change the settings to find it. Enjoy.
Original Post:
You are surely aware Win7 is pretty cranky with permissions and the UAC. But it’s also good protection from sneaky installers and such. If you like the Notepad++ editor and want spellchecking, you’ll need to install Aspell with the appropriate language spelling dictionary.
The problem is you can’t use the built-in functions to add words directly which aren’t already in your Aspell dictionary. If you try, you’ll get an error about lacking permission to write to some file. There is a user dictionary function, but Win7 tends to block that as implemented in Notepad++ and there probably won’t be a fix any time soon (the problem is with Aspell, not Notepad++). Nor is it easy to figure out the work-around.
Here’s what I do: First, create in your own user Documents folder a plain text file en.pws. The top line must be as follows:

personal_ws-1.1 en 13

The “en” part is simply the Aspell language abbreviation for English. Please note the number at the end must indicate the number of words in your personal dictionary. Right now, I have thirteen words. They must be stacked below this line, one word per line. I put them in alphabetical order and ignore case for my own use.
Then place a copy of this file in the top Aspell folder where it’s installed. On my Win7 64-bit, that’s:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspell

You’ll get an argument from UAC, but it can be easily overcome if your user account as Admin rights. As you use the editor, whenever Aspell finds a word it doesn’t recognize, and you know it’s correct, simply note the word and add it to your copy of the personal user dictionary in your Documents folder. In fact, I tend to open the dictionary file in a separate tab while editing other files. Be sure to increment the count in the top line to match the number of words. You may need to run the spellcheck more than once to be sure you caught all the words. Then copy this file again, overwriting the last copy you placed in the Aspell program folder. After a while, you should find yourself doing this less and less.
Enjoy!

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FOSS for Windows

Posted on November 17, 2011 by ehurst

The acronym is popular in some places: FOSS = Free and Open Source Software. Some of the best stuff I use on this Win7 laptop are free.
Libre Office: This is the recent fork of Open Office once owned by Sun. When Oracle bought them out, they shut down a lot of the Open Source projects Sun supported. Open Office sat nearly dead for a long time, then was spun off eventually, but now it seems the bulk of developers moved to the new fork. Libre can import almost every feature from any version of MS Office. An example of what doesn’t work is pivot tables in the Excel sheets, but then, Libre Office does over a million rows and Excel is limited to 64K. And while it imports and exports MS file formats with ease, including some older version the current MS Office won’t open, the native file format for Libre Office is usually smaller in size. It’s unlikely you’ll find any missing features you really need.
Pidgin IM: Instant Messaging client works with all the major protocols and some minor ones, too. Best of all, it doesn’t allow the worst of the snooping the other clients do, and doesn’t support the obligatory advertising junk which splatters the official clients. It works for me.
Bleachbit: A browser crap cleaner. It’s the only one I know for sure gets the nasty “evercookies” and almost all the various forms of persistent tracking measures various sites try to cram down your browser’s throat. You’ll need to spend some time reading what each of the options do and pick the ones which apply to you. It detects which browsers are installed. The best features are it removes all the web-bugs (tiny images with tracking codes imbedded), JScript tracking storage, and you really should have it eat your Flash cookies, too.
Free Commander: If you remember Norton Commander or Midnight Commander, this is for you. It’s a double-pane file manager which allows all the usual Windows features to work. Best of all, it’s the best and fastest FTP client I’ve ever used on Windows. I use it to upload files to my static website, and it allows editing the files in place with my favorite text editors. If you’ve never used a dual-paned file browser, you must not have had to move significant numbers of files. Just unzip it and install the executable that comes out.
I typically use two different text editors. One I use for files which need soft-wrapped lines. This is the Windows standard and is okay for most text files, but it works really well for stuff I intend to paste into the blog editor window. The other editor is the standard hard-wrap browser used for actually creating web pages. If you’ve ever had to go back and edit HTML, you’ll appreciate hard returns which limit the line length. But if you aren’t of a geek’s bent, you won’t like either one of my choices.
Notepad++: This I use for soft-wrapped files. It comes with a host of nifty plugins, and works with the famous Aspell library. The one problem you’ll have with this is you can’t easily add or edit the user’s dictionary. I’ll have to write a separate post on that issue, but it requires a bit of work because of the way permissions work on files. I find it worthwhile, because this is the best free editor for the purpose on Win7.
Vim for Windows: This is by far one of the best plain text editors ever invented. If you are a computer geek, you already know about it. If not, you can still come pretty close: Cream is an overlay of Vim which makes it more sane for non-geeks. The menu system is easier to understand, and most of your common keystrokes work the same as with other editors. What I find so important for me is the extreme adaptability; it can be configured in ways you’d never imagine. Explore the “Preferences” menus and sub-menus. I set it to display in a black background and colored text, and the syntax highlighting for HTML is extravagant. The editor does a fair job of applying HTML syntax to the text it affects, which helps you avoid forgetting to insert the closing tags on lots of things. It has lots of quirks, and you’ll have to learn an awful lot, but I get more from it than I’ve ever put in.
PuTTy: God bless Simon Tatham! My static site account runs on a Linux machine, and Linux rocks on the server. I can access my shell account from Windows using PuTTy. It opens a Linux terminal window via SSH protocol and I can hack to my heart’s content. Once you properly configure it, which means ignoring most of the settings and simply setting up the connections you use most, there’s nothing like it.
PySolFC: That’s Python Solitaire Fan Club Edition. The most extravagant collection of card and mahjong tile games you’ve ever seen in one place. It comes with built-in mood music. (I learned how to add my own favorites; it’s basically the old MOD music files.) It also comes with a large collection of event sounds, and you can turn them on or off individually. For an introvert like me, it’s one of the best ways to engage the ego so that the intuition can work away on something in the background. Good gaming.
Sumatra PDF Reader: This will hardly be as feature-full as the others, but it also lacks most of the security holes in the others. The one real drawback is the bundleware it seems we see everywhere these days, but it’s not hidden and it’s easy to say “no.” It doesn’t send any identifiable information about you, so far as I can tell, when it phones home periodically to check for updates. Yes, it does configure to be used in your browsers. (Libre Office will import and export PDFs if need editing capabilities.)
There are tons of other stuff out there, in varying degrees of complexity. Just ask; I may already know without having to research it.

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To My Fellow Christians: A Prophetic Warning

Posted on November 16, 2011 by ehurst

You are wrong about most things in one way or another because you have so deeply absorbed a fundamental error about which you seldom give a conscious thought: The high point of human social and religious development was early in Hebrew history, just about the time of the Conquest.
The pinnacle of human understanding of God’s will was in Christ. John’s Revelation of Jesus Christ (AKA: The Book of Revelation, The Apocalypse) was about Jesus Christ. In pointing out some not-so-obvious truth about his first cousin and best friend (no human on this earth ever knew Jesus better), John points out how the world is going to decline, steadily getting worse until the End. He wrote that from his own time, at the end of the First Century. As the last living Apostle, he knew human understanding as a whole would go downhill from his time. Jesus was the climax of all any human could know about God on the level of the flesh.
The things Jesus taught about Moses pointed back to a time long before His own life. We have to grasp the fundamental truth Judaism was not then, and certainly is not now, a valid understanding of Moses. Worse, He made it clear Moses was a weaker derivative of God’s Laws. He made very pointed complaints about the Talmud, which He referred to as “traditions of the elders” or “of men”. The point being, the “Oral Law” was bogus, a perversion of what God revealed through Moses and the written Scripture. It was a perversion because it was an understanding of Moses reinterpreted by Western analytical (AKA: Aristotelian) logic. In essence, it was the assumption a literal reading is best. That was a departure from God’s chosen intellectual climate for understanding revelation. Jesus taught this very thing, demanding the leadership of His day return to the Ancient Hebrew mystical understanding.
Almost the whole of modern Christianity assumes Aristotle was an advancement over the “primitive” ancient Hebrew ways. Christians assume without even so much as a scintilla of questioning that our Western intellectual assumptions are correct, superior to the old ways of the Ancient Hebrews. We thus reject Jesus’ teachings. Society has not advanced at all, and intellectual progress has been a progress away from the Truth of God.
The ancient mode of thinking has always been superior, and always will be. That is what God says. Sand is typically formed from degraded rock and stone. It’s no accident Jesus used sand and stone as a parable, because when you build on Aristotle, on the Enlightenment and any other form or Modernity or Post-modern thinking, you are building on sand. No part of Western Civilization is built on the Word of God. It is built on some human logic, an attempt to pulverize God’s Truth. The Rock is Christ, and His teaching presumes a rejection of Aristotle and the West.
Whatever is you believe you have built for God is just a sand castle, and it will collapse when the next period of tribulation washes over it. The Truth of God comes in symbolic logic, so get this now: Western Christianity is a fake.

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Radical Management: Budgeting

Posted on November 16, 2011 by ehurst

We work from the proper moral assumptions: Borrowing is evil unless you are starving.
I categorically reject the entire budgeting and management philosophy of the West. It’s wrong before the first thought is put down on paper. Unfortunately, it’s not going away quickly enough. Radical management means we pull as hard as we can to get things going in the right direction. Life itself is a compromise, but it helps to understand what the ideal actually is, not some Utopian goofball fantasy.
The greatest asset is the people, however much good you can get from them. That will always be your number one focus. If the things we do are not about people, we should stop doing them. Simply keeping people employed is not a bad goal, but it has to fit into the larger economic understanding of keeping everyone in as good of shape as possible. Your work should bless everyone it touches, even when that touch is third or fourth hand. Since few of us can think on such terms, we have to accept the idea that God’s Laws are always correct in what they aim to accomplish. Life can be no better than what God’s Laws promise. Do what He says, and He’ll make it work out. People always come first, and your personal needs as part of an organization belong in the same basket as the needs of everyone else.
If we aren’t helping people, we cannot justify taking a single dollar from the profits. There should never exist a commitment to some ephemeral thing called “profit” which does not belong to the people involved. If we don’t have the means to begin any particular operation, we don’t begin. If we can’t get people behind something which promotes their own welfare, we are starting at the wrong place. The pure profit motive is simply wrong by God’s Laws. Get rid of the materialistic approach which divides into capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. This is about human life, not cash or property.
Your budget is the people and their abilities. Material resources are simply the means to enable people. You should always start a company based on what you can do by yourself. If it works for you, others will want in on it. Let them invest themselves to whatever degree they see fit. No one is permitted to own any part of the results unless they are directly involved in making the profit happen. Never sell stock; that’s a sin — period. It isolates property from people, and property has not independent status before God. God’s Laws presume the entire operation is owned by the folks doing the work. They can invest and divest as they see fit, and there’s not much you can do if you can’t get them so personally involved they bail at the least difficulty. Make plans and budgets which account for such folly. Measure the man, not what’s in his pockets.
Granted, Western contract laws will make this difficult, but there’s nothing wrong with keeping stuff small, as that tends to keep government and law disinterested. All the more so when you understand the basic moral failure which attends aggregations of wealth and power in few hands. Good people don’t want that much power; they want good things for other people because that is in their own best interest. The premise here, of course, is that God Himself will fight at your side against the impersonal Borg Corporation against which you may be competing. It’s not about beating Borg in terms of profit and market standing, but in terms of how you made life better for the people involved. Under God’s Laws, management is serving, not ruling.
Since this is about people, it’s also about building friendships. Impersonal relations is an abomination in business. Yes, you read that right. You cannot have business without the commitment of persons, a personal relationship of some sort. Due to the paucity of good terminology in our English language, we have no variables for degrees and types of love. If we define “love” as the extension and exertion of the self on behalf of the welfare of another, it makes more sense to understand you must care about the people you encounter in your business. One love for the associate, another for the customer and vendors, but it’s all love of one kind or another. Otherwise, it’s not blessed, it’s damned.
Budget on the fly with what you have available, and conduct as much business as is possible from that ground. You cannot possibly control all the outcomes, anyway. All that projection and planning is based on a fundamentally false assumption, particularly when management weenies make those things demigods. Take what comes and stop when you run out of people power and resources.
If you don’t borrow to build up your business, you don’t surrender your friends to the power of someone who does not love them. If there was more manhood involved in business, there’d be a lot less suffering in this world. Stand up and take the fall for your miscalculations. Stop trying to insulate yourself from the normal ration of human suffering. Take the lead and do what’s right.

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Organizational Life

Posted on November 15, 2011 by ehurst

Management Craft: It’s an abomination to God that corporations should have “personhood” status before the law, but that organizations have their own life is obvious to anyone.
It seems almost a tautology that the best organizations die too young and too hideously, while the most worthless life on forever, metastasizing like cancer. Rare indeed is the organization led by people who strive hard to accomplish the mission so they can actually kill the thing and find other missions down the road. Human nature goes to pot quickly, becoming deeply wicked and ruthless when someone gets a safe tenure. Seeking one is dismissing the very vitality which makes life worth living.
Therefore, the wisest managers are equally ruthless in killing off projects which have outlived their purpose. As with Sucharitkul’s makrugh, we must recognize human life depends on people not becoming too comfortable. We thrive on trying to get it, not on having it. When we believe we have it, we die. Keep projects on task, limited to the purpose, then kill them as soon as possible.
The same goes for organizations as a whole. Perhaps you already understand that when a revolution has become institutionalized, it is the new Establishment wholly justifying a fresh revolution to bring it down. That’s because, so far, almost no revolution obeys God’s Laws, nor attempts to implement them. Given the complete unlikelihood of anything in our lifetimes seeking Justice on those terms, we content ourselves as administrators seeking the death of all institutions. The radical serves God’s will, but he becomes a child of God when he elevates it to an art.
Of course, this requires understanding the basic philosophical commitments necessary to play the loyal executioner. If your goal is to be remembered well, you have no hope. If your goal is to retire safely, you should stop now. If your goal is to do the right thing because that’s more valuable than your own life, then you are already on the path to greatness. Peace and safety can exist only inside the soul; it cannot exist externally because it has no life of its own.
It’s a basic principle of human management: Chaos isn’t particularly beneficial, but humans thrive in adversity. Need it be stated, those who cannot adapt are not quite human?

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People Are the Purpose

Posted on November 14, 2011 by ehurst

I’ve noted often as a former Army Military Policeman, I am anti-police. But I am not anti-policemen. Not only is there nothing to gain from hostility, it’s long past time for silly worrying about rights and so forth.
I agree it’s counter-productive to be obsequious. That’s because it still reduces the cop to something less than human, as much as being contemptuous. Both attitudes are dangerous in any situation. Even before God, servile sniveling is wrong. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand God’s revelation. He doesn’t require it for any human purpose, either.
The most destructive thing is being nervous in the presence of human authority. If God is my sole Master and Lord, everything else is role playing. There are times to put on one’s best thespian performance, but even civility itself means not dumping all the details on someone who doesn’t need them. But if you are sure your path is the one necessary for your own sanity, there should be no fear of consequences. Putting on that overly social demeanor from fear and discomfort proves you’ve lost all self-control and could easily be a threat as much as a guilty buffoon.
A vast range of human failure, particularly in dealing with other beings, is having done little to see what’s in the mirror. Deal with yourself realistically first, then you can deal with others appropriately. Social standards and common expectations mean little, except as you use them to your advantage, as a means to showing as much of your real self as the situation warrants.
I never forget Christian Mysticism nor my commitment to Truth. It’s not a question of what the policeman seeks, but what God seeks to bring forth of Himself and His glory in the situation. It’s altogether variable with His hands. There are times when it’s perfectly fine to toss your whole day’s plans and stand up for some obscure principle of fading civilization, and other times when it’s just the formality of dealing with a man or woman who has their own crumbling soul hidden behind that badge. Frankly, I pray for the people behind all the false fronts, because I never know whom the Father would have me target for His attention until I ask.
I have precious little control over the situation around me. The only thing left to master is my own behavior as the means to showing the truth.

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No Normal Person Is Ever Finished Moving

Posted on November 13, 2011 by ehurst

The worst is over, now.
All the stuff we intended to keep is now in another place. Most of those places are fairly appropriate, for now. There are a few items still sitting in inconvenient places, but don’t expect to be moved soon. Some items, maybe never. Normal humans always find more important things to do than to obsessively park every item in some particular proper place.
Being as I’m an introvert, I need lots of time just to be with my own thoughts. It’s not a dislike of others; other people are the only reason I live. And I am quite comfortable dealing with just about anyone, but only when there’s a reason for it. So instead of picking over things not completely put away, I’m needing right now a lot of quiet time.
Of course, with all the walking, climbing and lifting I’ve done over the past few days, my bad knee is swollen and painful. That means I can’t even take a solitary walk. That bike might need a long ride tomorrow.
I’m blessed to have enticed my neighbors to take away all but two pieces of junk. It would have filled a dual-axle U-Haul trailer. My entire collection of vintage computer stuff went all at once. I’ve kept only a tiny handful of spares I’ve seen the need to use in the past. My “office” is a comfy office chair I bought awhile back, a shelf full of stuff I use all the time, and my laptop — all next to the bed. My private space is smaller than most aircraft cockpits.
The only thing I’m still waiting on is a real job.

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Hatred for Those Who Don't Hurt

Posted on November 12, 2011 by ehurst

There are few things more threatening to wealth, and civilization itself, than mandatory ritual mourning.
On 19 April 1995 I was standing near a large plate glass window on the second floor of a college classroom building, high atop a hill in Edmond, Oklahoma. In a few minutes class would begin and I was just finishing a conversation with a friend. It was around 9AM. The glass in front of me rattled, the floor jolted and there was a loud, sharp thump which sounded to my military-trained ears as a large mortar impact — CRUMP! (Homemade explosives simply cannot do that.)
After all the hideous lies from the federal government over what that was all about, there was an even bigger threat to those of us who live in Central Oklahoma: Mandatory sorrow over the loss of life. That is, the sudden imposition of political power into the hands of widows, widowers and other grieving relatives was a far more dangerous weapon than the bombs which brought down the building on those inside. To this day we are all made to feel false guilt into eternity if we don’t pickle ourselves in the unforgiving sorrow of the Victims. I don’t complain so much about the memorial, a hideous and utterly artless boondoggle, because that’s what most monuments are like. It’s the eternal imposition of very real limitations of everyday life which will make everything downtown more expensive than it has to be.
I’ve lost relatives to hideous injustice, too. We didn’t see the need of imposing our loss on the whole world. Rather, we honor them by avoiding just that very thing. If we do not live to make things better, our deaths are merely a relief.
How many mourned the loss of military life yesterday? How many mourned the walking wounded still among us? Instead, we simply allow banks to confiscate their homes while they recover what little is left of their flesh in the hospital. Sure, it’s technically illegal, but we are too busy with other things to raise much hue and cry. How about a little justice while they live, so we don’t have so much sorrow when they die?
People do awful things because humanity is broken. There will always be the imbalance of power handed to predators who don’t play by the rules. All that does is prove the rules were a pretty good idea, if only poorly implemented. But we don’t honor that notion very well. It’s rather like that perverse romantic silliness sweeping places like Vietnam, where having a broken heart over lost love is far more important than being in love.
It’s also the primary reason for initiation rituals, and why they tend to get worse with each passing generation of initiates. Everyone has to add to the mandatory suffering of others until people start dying. What began as legitimate training becomes hateful hazing, a bizarre ritual of having to lick the feet of Satan for the privilege of burning in Hell.
So here we go again. Joe Paterno did what the law requires. He went to the police. What everyone wants to ignore is the crime was under the jurisdiction of the Campus Police at Penn State. Telling the administration is telling the police. It was the entire upper staff which committed the crime of coverup. It was no longer on his shoulders, but theirs. Call it “Pedo State” and close the stinking school, but firing Paterno is nothing more than pickling the world in the personal sorrow of a few victims. I’m not even sure it’s what they wanted, but it’s done in their names, and whatever protest they might have about the outcome is missing.
We have come to the place when the greater injustices in our world will be committed by the victims who can’t stand the idea other folks aren’t hurt. A few men have raw and painful memories that will trouble them for life. I have enough of my own, thank you. Today’s political Victim Class project their sorrow on the rest of the world and demand, demand, demand, without end.

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Great Aspirations

Posted on November 11, 2011 by ehurst

All my life, I’ve never been happier than digging ditches or stumps.
Too bad I can’t get paid for it. I’m not competitive in the market right now. I’m too slow with the digging and nobody does trees by hand these days. Still, whenever I get a chance for a volunteer job I always do it. I also think it’s fun to put on steel roofing, and it’s almost fun to do shingles, but not if anyone is in a hurry. (Edit: I should note such work allows me to avoid standing still which hurts and makes my knees swell after just a half hour or so.)
Today I cut up some scrap lumber and other bits and pieces and built a shelf to wrap around, and stand above, an old desk. We are moving things around in our house, and that old wooden desk will become my beloved’s computer desk. There’s a wire shelf just above where the computer and monitor will stand to hold our printers. Above that will be another shelf on which to rest the cable modem and router. Much better coverage inside the house when the wifi router is up high. We won’t be living by ourselves any more.
I’m ditching my huge collection of ancient Linux CDs and a bunch of other crap I don’t use any more. Cleaning out a whole bunch of stuff like that. I put out a sign at the edge of the yard next to the street saying “Free Stuff!” Then started setting out junk still useful, but not to me. So far, it’s mostly disappeared. Beats hauling it down to the community dumpster.
We are compacting our lives down. I don’t intend to move again, but I do want to be more mobile. No more running servers in the house. My whole computer office will soon fit in the laptop bag. I’m still hoping the computer support ministry grows, but I won’t be fixing any more here at home. I’m switching strictly to house calls.
I have no idea how I’ll keep myself busy this winter, but something nagging at the corners of my mind tells me I will be busy. No heroics. I agree with Old Jules sewage work is by far more heroic than many things, but I may be getting too old for that stuff, at least full time.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep piddling away at stuff people want done, but not in a hurry. Semi-retirement is serious business.

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Short Attention Span

Posted on November 10, 2011 by ehurst

Washington’s Blog notes correctly much of what we see today has been in the works far longer than most people realize.

From my earliest memories, I have always been trying to see the forest, and not just the trees. Something about the gestalt, the holistic view always appealed to me. I wanted to know where current events came from, and how we got into this mess. It has always been easier to decide how to act if you understand why following your internal inclinations causes pain and conflict with your circumstances.

So, as a Military Policeman in the late 1980s, when given access to high level training guidance and national professional standards for policemen, I began trying to understand the pattern. Our Provost Marshal was big on such things, and I kept overhearing talk of evolving standards and greater federal influence in local police training. I picked his brain often. At the time, I was foolish enough to be on board with this stuff.

By the time I began having serious knee trouble, I also began having doubts about what I was learning. A career in Law Enforcement was less and less appealing. I wanted out. So when my term expired, I didn’t take the offered promotion to reenlist, offered despite my permanent knee problems. I came home. A short time later I watched on TV news the unfolding drama in Waco. A few years later, I was the object of federal harassment myself. All of which merely confirmed my growing apprehension while still in uniform.

Thus, I can confirm from inside the system itself that during the late 1980s, things changed for policemen everywhere in the US. Those US Marshals had easy access to my military records, and could have known I was ostensibly on their side. But the days of doing the work, of thinking before jumping in and “making a collar” (an arrest) were long gone. When the federal government interferes directly in the politics of a tiny rural Baptist church, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional. They never so much as twitched a finger to help me clean up the mess they made of my life.

And they call it “professional standards.” It was all part of the long term plans to make life a living hell for folks here in the US, and I’m sure they have been the same for all the world.

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