2004-04-27-0519Z


Well, here I was updating my Cygwin installation; a slew of new packages were available, and in particular a long-awaited (by me) fix for Lilypond which puts lyrics into the generated .midi files. So I went to the kitchen to put on some coffee. You know those big 5-gallon plastic bottles, you put them upside-down onto this dispenser, and push down on the handle to fill your glass. But with a coffee-maker carafe, this gets tedious, so you flip it up as you're getting your filter and other supplies. But the damn thing is so slow that it's not done even then, so you go back to whatever you were doing just to check one little thing.

But then your friend logs in, and you see his name pop up in MSN Messenger. Naturally you forget everything at that point and just start text-chatting away. Well, next thing I knew there were 5 gallons of water on the floor. Bummer. Well, my serapes are absorbing it now, and here I am back at the computer.

As Cygwin was downloading, I noticed a package called 'aspell'. I had been looking for ispell on my machine the other day, and couldn't find it. I was pretty sure there was some other spell checker included with cygwin, but apropos spell didn't find anything.

So anyway, I look up how apropos gets it input from the 'whatis' database, which is created by /usr/sbin/makewhatis from the manpages. But aspell has no manpage, so I created a one-liner in /usr/man/mann/aspell.n. No good. /var/cache/man/whatis still didn't have an entry after running makewhatis. So I fixed it the old-fashioned way. I fired up vi and put an entry in that file:

aspell               (n)  - spell checker to check and correct spelling

I know there's redundancy in there but I wanted to make sure it matched on both spell and spelling. So anyway, next time I forget aspell I can type apropos spell and find it easily.

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