Monthly Archives: July 2014

Bad Spellers and Typists Rejoice

Some people are bad spellers or at least consistently have trouble with certain words. Others can spell but are poor typists and constantly mistype words. Some, I suppose, fall into both categories. If any of this describes you, don’t despair: … Continue reading

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Literate Programming and Your Emacs Configuration

My init.el isn’t very organized. Partly, that’s because I like having a single file rather than the multitude of special configuration files that many of my Emacs heroes prefer. But even given that it’s a single file, it’s not really … Continue reading

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Proced

The invaluable Mickey has an excellent post up on proced, a ps/top-like utility built into Emacs. If you find yourself using top and ps—and what serious developer doesn’t?—you’ll love having the functionality built right into Emacs. One more reason not … Continue reading

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Kitchin on Org-mode

John Kitchin is on a roll. Just the other day, I wrote about his org-ref project and the really great work he is doing in introducing his students to reproducible research via Emacs and Org-mode. Now, he has a new … Continue reading

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Automating Git Bisect

I’ve written a couple of times about Git bisect. It’s a way of finding the commit that introduced an error. It works by (essentially) doing a binary search on the commit history. Now, Curtis Poe over at Ovid shows us … Continue reading

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Reflections on Trusting Trust

A reference to Ken Thompson’s fantastic paper Reflections on Trusting Trust popped up yesterday on Hacker News. I’ve written about this paper before but it deserves a periodic mention. If you haven’t read this paper before, I urge you in … Continue reading

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A Medical Decision Tree

Back in March, I wrote about Edward Frenkel and his explanation of the purported backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. I also mentioned his book Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Now Zygmunt Zając over at FastML … Continue reading

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Guess Who Those Targeted Individuals Are

The Targets Here in the U.S., today is independence day. It’s a day to celebrate our forebears’ refusal to submit to what they considered unjust treatment at the hands of their government. One of their major complaints was general warrants: … Continue reading

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(Lots of) Stuff You Didn’t Know About Emacs and Unicode

Christopher Wellons has another great post on the minutia of Emacs. This time it’s about Emacs unicode pitfalls. Most of us know that Emacs uses UTF-8 as its internal data representation but little more. That’s mostly Okay because almost all … Continue reading

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Emacs Introduction and Demo

Howard Abrams has a nice video that serves as an introduction and demonstration of Emacs. Don’t be fooled by the “introduction” part. Abrams doesn’t spend any time on the usual 【Ctrl+p】 to move up a line, 【Ctrl+n】 to move a … Continue reading

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