Monthly Archives: March 2012

Org-Drill

Posted on 2012-03-20 by jcs

When I was browsing Hacker News today, I stumbled upon a neat Org mode extension called org-drill. The idea is that it implements an electronic version of flash cards that are useful for learning vocabulary or other facts. Obviously, this … Continue reading →

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Org-Mac-Link-Grabber

Posted on 2012-03-18 by jcs

Yesterday I wrote about my on-going effort to get rid of paper and to keep all my records and projects anchored in Org files. Yesterday’s post was about easily linking to receipts from my tax file. That’s nice because I … Continue reading →

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Spam: There’s A Lot Of That Going Around

Posted on 2012-03-17 by jcs

Last week I wrote about a spike in forum spam that Irreal is seeing (1, 2). Of course, Irreal is a small site and even on our worst days we see at most 10–15 spam comments. Charlie Stross, a noted … Continue reading →

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Linking To Receipts

Posted on 2012-03-17 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I use Emacs and Org mode to track expenses for tax purposes. At the heart of the system are Org tables for various categories of expenses. Last month, I wrote about how a small piece … Continue reading →

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Virtual Dired

Posted on 2012-03-14 by jcs

Today, I stumbled upon Kirubakaran Athmanathan’s post Efficiently Browsing Text or Code and learned a new Emacs trick. Athmanathan’s post is about leveraging the power of Emacs to efficiently find some text in a large group of files, choose the … Continue reading →

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Smells And Properties

Posted on 2012-03-13 by jcs

Paul Graham has posted a provocative essay on the copyright wars. He starts by recalling a childhood tale in which the owner of a food shop grows annoyed when a poor student enjoys the delicious smell of his cooking food. … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, And Elisp Compared

Posted on 2012-03-12 by jcs

A month ago we had a lively discussion here at Irreal on the question of whether or not Elisp sucks. As with most questions of this sort, there were champions of both positions: some felt that Elisp is a distinctly … Continue reading →

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Spam Update

Posted on 2012-03-12 by jcs

I’m seeing yet another spike in spam so I’ve reluctantly turned on moderation again. If NuCaptcha can plug the hole that appears to be allowing this spam I will, of course, turn it off again. Interestingly, one mystery is solved. … Continue reading →

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Spam Raises Its Head Again

Posted on 2012-03-11 by jcs

After a period of virtually no forum spam I’m seeing a spike in the amount of spam. This may be because of the recent NuCaptcha break or it may be due to the spammers using a Mechanical Turk-like strategy of … Continue reading →

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Quicklisp

Posted on 2012-03-10 by jcs

After being inspired to finally start using ELPA to handle my Emacs packages, I decided to try out Zach Beane’s Quicklisp library manager for Common Lisp. Up until now, I’ve been using the manual method to get things into ASDF, … Continue reading →

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