Monthly Archives: November 2012

Let’s Play VimGolf

Posted on 2012-11-30 by jcs

Or VimGolf in Emacs anyway. Over at Life seen through a coder’s eyes, Yassine Chaouche poses the following problem. Starting with an Emacs buffer containing only [[Image(grep_1.png)]] end up with [[Image(grep_1.png)]] [[Image(grep_2.png)]] [[Image(grep_3.png)]] [[Image(grep_4.png)]] [[Image(grep_5.png)]] [[Image(grep_6.png)]] [[Image(grep_7.png)]] [[Image(grep_8.png)]] Chaouche solves … Continue reading →

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Mawking AWK with Lisp

Posted on 2012-11-29 by jcs

Back in 2009, Brendan O’Connor over at AI and Social Science posted an article entitled Don’t MAWK AWK—the fastest and most elegant big data munging language! He recently posted an update that caused the original article to pop up on … Continue reading →

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A Hyper Key for the Mac

Posted on 2012-11-28 by jcs

The other day I wrote about using the Mac’s virtual keypad to get some additional key sequences for Emacs. That didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped because, unlike my MacBook Pro, the keyboard for my iMac doesn’t have … Continue reading →

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Get Rid of the TSA Before They Kill Us

Posted on 2012-11-27 by jcs

As regular readers know, we here at Irreal are not fans of the TSA. Apparently, Charles Kenny at BloombergBusinessweek isn’t a fan either. He’s posted an article entitled Airport Security Is Killing Us in which he makes the case that … Continue reading →

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Using the Keypad

Posted on 2012-11-26 by jcs

Xah Lee has an interesting post on defining keys to open frequently used files (search for 2012-11-21). The idea is that you add lines like (global-set-key (kbd “<kp-7> <kp-3>”) (lambda () “” (interactive) (find-file “~/web/ergoemacs_org/emacs/blog.html”))) for each of the files … Continue reading →

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Debating Copyright Without the RSC

Posted on 2012-11-25 by jcs

I recently wrote about an excellent policy brief published by the Republican Study Committee that discussed copyright. Sadly, the RSC withdrew the brief within 24 hours after heavy complaints from lobbyists for big media. Now, Techdirt, which also covered the … Continue reading →

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The Y-Combinator

Posted on 2012-11-24 by jcs

Jim Weirich, of Neo gave a really nice talk on The Y-Combinator at RubyConf2012. Given the venue, the examples are, of course, in Ruby but you should have no difficulty following them: I know no Ruby at all but was … Continue reading →

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Why We Use IDEs

Posted on 2012-11-23 by jcs

Wille Faler over at recursivity.com has a nice post on IDEs and why we need them. His take is that if you need an IDE it’s because of shortcomings in the language you’re using. He has in mind, of course, … Continue reading →

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Bashisms

Posted on 2012-11-22 by jcs

Russell Power over at rjpower.org has a nice post on some Bash tricks. Despite over 20 years of Bash use I learned something new. It turns out that if you type【Ctrl+x Ctrl+e】Bash will bring up an editor session that allows … Continue reading →

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SICP and Why It Matters

Posted on 2012-11-21 by jcs

Brian Harvey, who has been teaching the Berkeley SICP course for 25 years has an interesting and moving tribute to the famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which he calls the best computer science book in the world. Irreal … Continue reading →

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