Tech of the day: Adding a printer in Arch Linux

We have a network printer which we identified using an IP address. There are quite a few steps to add this printer to Windows XP. One would imagine it would be much harder on Arch. Well, It can't be easier! Here were my steps (thanks to these instructions):
1) install the following using pacman
pacman -S cups ghostscript gsfonts gutenprint

2) start the CUPS daemon
/etc/rc.d/cups start

3) hit the admin page
http://localhost:631

4) add the printer
you just need to give your printer a name, location, description. Since this is a network printer, use the AppSocket Protocol, i.e., specify the Device URI as:
socket://[the printer's IP address]

So easy! However, this is the first time I agree with the people who complain about Linux using cryptic names. There's no way I could tell CUPS is used for configuring printing before I see what it stands for (Common UNIX Printing System)

Tech of the day: correct backspace in Emacs

I wrote about trying out Zile as my Emacs replacement the other day. For some reason Ctrl-K doesn't work so I went thru the pain of installing all dependencies for Emacs and finally got it running. Life is good except backspace is acting like Ctrl-D. Backspace is notoriously problematic for Emacs but the problem was usually that it acts like Ctrl-H! Well, I did find my fix. Just add this to .emacs:
(global-set-key [backspace] 'delete-backward-char)

Music of the day: Flamingo

What could be more inspiring after a violin lesson than listening to the works of some great violin master? That's exactly what KCSM (our local jazz station) did for me today, by playing Stephane Grappelli's Flamingo.