Tag Archives: Tech

Five Shell One Liners

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned and pining for the old days. Or perhaps I’m anticipating the time when I can finally wave my cane at all those pesky kids. Whatever the case, I do believe that avoiding the command line—or … Continue reading

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Vimari

Back in August, I wrote about my quest to minimize mouse usage as much as possible. That’s easy in Emacs where my mouse usage is essentially zero. It’s a bit harder when navigating between apps and performing various system duties … Continue reading

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Exploratory Data Analysis With AWK

This post is about Brian Kernighan and AWK, two things always worth hearing about. All of you, I’m sure, know that after retiring from Bell Labs, Kernighan took a professorship at his Alma Mater, Princeton. Since he’s been there, Kernighan … Continue reading

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New AWK Book

Long time Irreal readers know that I’m a fan of the AWK language. Whatever OS you’re using, AWK is sure to be available. It’s installed by default on all Unix/Linux systems and may be on Windows as well. Linux systems … Continue reading

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Compiler Humor

Apropos of Nothing, as Cheryl Crow once put it, here’s something you don’t see very often: compiler humor. From another era when engineers were still allowed to inject whimsy into software, Tony Cunningham offers us a selection of error messages … Continue reading

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Striving For A Mouse Free Workflow

As I’ve often suggested—most recently here and here—I try to minimize my use of the mouse as much as I can. Mostly that’s been in the context of Emacs where it’s easy. My desire to avoid the mouse is not … Continue reading

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REPL Driven Programming

I’ve written many times about what I call “exploratory” or “interactive” programming. The idea is you build your program from the bottom up, trying out expressions, building them into larger and larger units until you have a whole program. For … Continue reading

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Config File Languages

Joe Marshall over at Abstract Heresies has a short allegory on designing configuration file languages. We’ve probably all been there. It starts off simple: he just wants a configuration file that handles key/value pairs. But then he finds he needs … Continue reading

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The Old Days

I ran across this amazing picture on Massimo, a splendid site that offers several fascinating and unusual tweets a day. If you like being surprised and astounded, give Massimo a look. The picture is of the original IBM hard drive. … Continue reading

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Worst Practices

Although you may not have heard anything from Mike Zamansky lately, he’s still blogging—mostly about teaching—and maintaining an active presence on the Web. He just retired from Hunter so perhaps he’ll find time to enlighten us with a Using Emacs … Continue reading

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