Here be monsters

Grr. There are unfathomable deeps surrounding authentication with the Wolfram smtp server when connecting from outside their network. My email will stay on my office computer, accessed via emacs through ssh X forwarding. Back to Mathematica coding - I've had enough lisp for the night.

On the bright side, I'm now using my new squeaky-clean & organized .emacs and .gnus files that I came up with during all this. A general cleanup can violate Grohens' Law of Information Conservation if you're not careful. I tossed code only if I couldn't remember what it was for or the last time I used it. It's still hanging around in old files, though, in case I really need some of it.

Never throw away information

That was the first bit of advice Joe Grohens gave me when I started working at Wolfram Research in 1996, and it's still the best programming maxim I know. I just rediscovered its value.

Five years ago Dave and I were editing some documentation source files when we found some old TeX macros that weren't used anymore. He left them in the code and defined them as no-ops, while I was leaning towards getting rid of them all. And there those macros sat doing nothing for half a decade til tonight when I suddenly needed the information they preserved.

Never throw away information.