Author Archives: jcs

An Example of RSS Use

Posted on 2022-02-21 by jcs

Chris Hardie is, like me, a believer in RSS and considers it an important protocol that can be used for more than just following blogs. He considers the example of a municipal website that posts information of concern to its … Continue reading →

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The Year 2038 Problem

Posted on 2022-02-20 by jcs

All of you Unix heads know about the coming Unix apocalypse. On January 19, 2038, the 32-bit Unix time variable will overflow and Unix will suddenly think it’s December 13, 1901. Except, of course, virtually all extant Unix systems now … Continue reading →

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The Bash Bible

Posted on 2022-02-19 by jcs

Years ago I remember reading in Kernighan and Pike’s The Unix Programming Environment a quote about how the shell was very often their preferred programming language: When you’re faced with writing a new program, there’s a natural tendency to start … Continue reading →

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Delivery Robot Traffic Jam

Posted on 2022-02-18 by jcs

One of the reasons I love being in New York City is that you can get virtually any type of food delivered at any time. Tampa is hardly a backwater but pre-covid we didn’t have a robust food delivery infrastructure … Continue reading →

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Ibuffer

Posted on 2022-02-17 by jcs

This tweet from Mickey `M-x ibuffer’ is a strictly superior buffer list compared to the default one in #emacs bound to `C-x C-b’. It comes with dozens of commands and utility features. Like filtering and grouping, highlighting, and much, much … Continue reading →

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More on Google’s Poor Search Results

Posted on 2022-02-16 by jcs

Back in January, I wrote about a Twitter thread concerning poor Google search results. The complaint was almost all the results were ads. DKB has a new post that covers the same ground. He says that Google is dying and … Continue reading →

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Own A Color

Posted on 2022-02-15 by jcs

Most Irreal readers are, I’m sure, like me in their skepticism of the NFT concept. It just wreaks of a scam to me and the most generous way of describing it is as a reincarnation of the Netherlands famous Tulip … Continue reading →

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Symbols in Lisp

Posted on 2022-02-14 by jcs

Joe Marshall over at Abstract Heresies has a post that makes a point that’s easy to forget: Lisp has symbols and those symbols should be used in preference to strings or integers to represent arbitrary state constants. Most other languages … Continue reading →

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Words and Ideas

Posted on 2022-02-13 by jcs

Paul Graham has a new essay up that discusses words and ideas. It’s an interesting piece that reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. The quote from Daniel Boorstin—a University of Chicago historian and the 12th Librarian of Congress—is … Continue reading →

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Some Comment Tips from Mickey

Posted on 2022-02-12 by jcs

If you write code, you’re probably always adding and deleting comments. It’s one of those things that’s so fundamental you’d think everyone already knows the best way of dealing with them but I often see questions about how best to … Continue reading →

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