The Sermon Page

All material on this page has been compiled from the Holy Epistles of the Church of the Mighty Emacs by His Eminence L.P. Patmore, Bishop of the Central Indiana Diocese of the Holy Church of the Mighty Emacs and Presiding Grand Marmoset of the Most Arcane Order of the Great Conspiracy.

Copyright Notice: All material on this page may be copied verbatim or used for any purpose, provided that this entire notice is preserved. Copyright 2009, His Eminence L.P. Patmore, Bishop of the Central Indiana Diocese of the Holy Church of the Mighty Emacs.

Sermon 1:

Freeom and the Parable of the Laser Printer

Alas, the code does fork. The sacred Emacs is being fragmented into projects such as XEmacs, though, ever in the package repositories of our distributions, waits the one true editor. The wonder of binaries makes it very easy to install the one true editor on our systems, though, let us not forget its source. Immaculate tablets of Lisp, brought down from the Mt. MIT by St. Ignucius, running on the machines of ITS. Empty strings were the pass-phrases, for a pass-phrase was the lock and key of system administrators. ITS was designed to be free from the start, but, as order can only move to chaos, morals corrupted. The Guru Stallman had 1/5 of the lab using empty string pass-phrases, once such practices had been implimented Users were not tracked or restricted on ITS, at least not from the start, for there was no reason to do so. There were not crackers using the ITS system. There were no crackers using ARPANET or other such services at that time. But, we find ourselves looking at pass-phrases as essential today, as assholes have found their way into the expansive and mystical realms of data processing.

Beware the script kiddies, O hackers, and let not their names foul yours. Thanks to news media and other such idiocy, the word hacker is now tainted. Hackers the tainted are not. The tainted may be known by many names, (as our our reptilian overlords). Such names of crackers include script kiddies, 1337, leet, lamers, hax0rs, w@rez d00dZ, phreaks, and other infantile, corrupt ASCII babble.

Let us now remember the parable of the Xerox printer, as spoken to us by The Guru Stallman. The same parable that he taught his children as The Guru Stallman visited many lecture halls.

Xerox gifted to the AI Lab a machine most great. It printed lines e'er straight and circles e'er round. Not like the machines of yesterday's day, that printed circles like ellipses and lines like low amplitude sine waves. Though, the machine frequently broke down and vexed users. Though, for the previous printer, The Guru Stallman had set up a system that would message users when their print job had completed. It would also send messages to users of the great ITS when the printer broke down or ran out of something. “The printer is broken, please go and fix it.” said ITS. To set up a system like this, The Guru Stallman first had access to the driver and other software that controlled. Though, when the new Xerox printer was given to them, the source code was not.

The Guru Stallman did know of one who possessed the source code for the Xerox printer.

“They made me promise that I wouldn't let you see the code.” said the man. The Guru Stallman was so angered by this, that he left the man's office without further speech. This then began a fire of anger and rage inside of Richard.

The Guru Stallman then started his own movement, backed by the magical and high code of the GNU project. It was then that The Guru Stallman and those who followed him had to write many millions of lines of code, to replace the proprietary UNIX, for which licenses were very expensive.

Think about that, my children, the birth of the great and mighty GNU. Though, Emacs came from before the time of the GPL. It was purified by the GPL, and now runs on our holy and most Free GNU+Linux machines. Praise be to the one true editor!

Amen.

Sermon 2:

On the Deep Magic

O children of Emacs and St. Ignucius, hear the parable and be enlightened!

In the days of yore, our brother from the Open Source movement, Eric S. Raymond was examining the case of a PDP-10, and found a mysterious toggle switch, attached to the case. And a curious switch it was. The switch had two positions: Magic, and More Magic, scrawled upon the cover plate in pencil. On the inside of the machine, it was found that the switch in question had but one lead going to it. That one lead came to a rats nest of cables in the bottom of the machine.

It was a known fact of electricity, that a switch with only one lead can do nothing. Eric changed the position of the switch from More Magic to Magic. And lo, a bit was lost somewhere in the internals of the machine, and the computer was thus crashed. Brother Eric revived the machine, with the switch set back in the More Magic position.

“Fetch Richard Greenblatt.” they eventually decided. Greenblatt diked out the switch and found that the lead went to ground on the chassis. The chassis itself was very well grounded. The computer did crash a second time, under the inspection of Father Greenblatt. The computer was revived without the switch.

It has been theorized that the cause of this phenomenon was a small change in ground capacitance of the computer. Somebody relieving themselves in the loo across the hall would have had the same effect and to the same degree. 'T was magic, digits be damned! Binary numerals are a mere abstraction of Magic, which is what all digital machines truly run on. What happens in the power supply of a computer? Electricity is converted to a magical life force, which transistors feed on in their chips in their sockets! It is a delicate balance, magic is.

Why do arcane programming tricks work? Because God wills it.