2 for 1 update special

As indicated by the title, I actually have two things to mention this time. Shocking, no?

First off, I (finally) released the new version of Abakus that I’ve been going on about. There’s some good stuff, including more raiding of the SpeedCrunch goody-chest. For example, Abakus now supports function and variable completion (with descriptions), syntax highlighting, and showing you the result of your calculation in a tooltip before hitting Enter.

In addition, it supports the GNU Multiple Precision library now (in conjuction with the MPFR add-on). It’s actually not significantly different in my tests, except for issues with raising negative numbers to powers. It is, however, significantly faster, especially with complex expressions. If you don’t have it, don’t worry, Abakus will fallback to the code it used in 0.85.

In other news (and probably more interesting news for my family, Hi Grandma!), the other day I mentioned scouting out for donuts. What I didn’t mention then (and what my wife’s having me mention now ;-), is a funny encounter we had on the way there.

I was pulling up to a red stoplight, and there were railroad tracks in front of us. Luckily for me, I figured, we’d have juuuuuust enough space to squeeze behind the car in front of us and still be off the track. And besides, it’s not like a train ever comes down the tracks…

Of course, Mary says something about it, and of course, I point out that there’s no train coming anyways. Of course, as soon as I pointed down the track, a headlight appeared. As it started coming closer, you could make out the orange blinking lights on the engine as well.

I was hoping that perhaps I was just seeing a car, but I look around, and sure enough, the red blinking signposts are beginning to come down. So I started inching as far forward as I could without hitting the car in front. Luckily the light finally turned green at that time and off we went. The train passed behind us not 5 seconds after we passed through the intersection though. o_O