Xemacs 21.4.20 has problem with Windows network drives

I'm working on a project which uses C and SQL Lite. Normally I've been a Java guy and I haven't done any serious work with C since 1996. I also use a PC and Cygwin to give myself a Unixy environment on the PC.

Since I'm just experimenting with the API I figured I would just add the gcc package. I haven't upgraded Cygwin in a while so when I added gcc I decided to upgrade all my Cygwin packages. Big mistake. Apparently Xemacs 21.4.20-2 has a bug in which it reads files and directories on network drives as read only:

http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2007-April/011117.html
http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2007-May/011164.html

The solution: use cygwin to downgrade the xemacs package until this issue is resolved. I downgraded to 21.4.19-3 and this worked. I had to troll the net far and wide to find this information and put it together. This post is a service to those who will encounter this problem so they won't have to go though the blind alleys that I did.

This little regression burned about an hour of my time. I definitely can't charge my client for that little digression. Ug!

Happy Beer-thday to me!

It was my birthday recently and I decided to have a party, dammit! I haven't celebrated my party in a very long time (decades, perhaps) so it was a long time overdue.

The theme of my party was beer. Attendees were encouraged to bring a 22 oz bottle or two of beer to share. My friends were really creative and found some interesting varieties. The party didn't go very late (early crowd) so there was a lot left over. I spent the next day finishing up the open bottles. I have enough left over beer for another party - perhaps later this month.

Beer was a pervasive theme of the party. For the BBQ, we had chicken with a beer and mustard glaze. The desert was a chocolate Guiness cake - which went really, really well with the Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout. Mmmmmmmmmm.... I think I'll be imbibing more of the stouts in the coming months and years.

Good times and it was a great celebration of good beers. Thanks to all that showed up and brought great beers!