Monthly Archives: June 2012

Emacs 24.1 Has Been Released

Posted on 2012-06-10 by jcs

Emacs 24.1 is ready for download from the usual places. There’s all kinds of little improvements that we’ve talked about from time to time but the main features, as described by the release notice, are: The new packaging system. This … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs display-battery-mode

Posted on 2012-06-09 by jcs

I have occasionally run across the Emacs display-battery-mode command—it’s in Aaron Hawley’s excellent reference sheet, for example. I never bothered really looking at it because my MacBook Pro already has an battery status icon on the menu bar. Today, out … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Blind Tennis

Posted on 2012-06-08 by jcs

The next time you’re tempted to whine about how hard a task is; how it’s simply impossible; how obviously no one could be expected to do it: remember this. I know I will.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Password Advice

Posted on 2012-06-07 by jcs

There’s been a lot of snark going around the last few days over this password help screen from the Texas Attorney General’s Child Support Services Web Page. Child Support Services are, of course, doing the best they can to preserve … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Error and Restarts in Common Lisp

Posted on 2012-06-06 by jcs

Robert Smith over at Symbo1ics Ideas has a very nice introduction to restarts in Common Lisp. Restarts are a part of the CL error system (more accurately, part of the CL condition system) and provide a way to recover from … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Emacs comment-dwim Command

Posted on 2012-06-05 by jcs

I really like the Emacs comment-dwim command. The dwim—do what I mean—neatly captures the idea of the command. It looks at the context in which it is called and then does the right thing™. Most often, I highlight a region … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Recursive Greps

Posted on 2012-06-04 by jcs

I’ve been using the Unix grep utility for over 20 years but today I learned something new. Mikko Ohtamaa over at Open Source Hacker has a nice post on Power searching using UNIX grep. The post explores some of the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 6 Comments

The Social Network of a Word

Posted on 2012-06-03 by jcs

I ran across an interesting interview question the other day: Given a base word and a list of other words, use the Levenshtein distance to find the social network of the base word in the list of other words. More … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 3 Comments

Scrolling with Lion, Redux

Posted on 2012-06-02 by jcs

As I wrote yesterday, my laptop recently had major surgery. That appears to have gone well but when I got the machine back I noticed that it had Snow Leopard installed instead of Lion. I knew they were going to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Back!

Posted on 2012-06-01 by jcs

Annnnnd, I’m back. For the one or two of you who may have wondered were I’ve been, here’s the story. Last month, between the fifteenth and twentieth, I was in New York. I didn’t have to a chance to queue … Continue reading →

Posted in Administrivia | Leave a comment