Author Archives: jcs

Writing Elisp Functions

Posted on 2021-09-25 by jcs

John Kitchin is back with another in his series of videos comparing Python and Elisp programming. This time it’s about writing Elisp functions. Earlier, Kitchin made a video discussing how to write Python functions. This video is a followup that … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Dark Mode, Like It Or Not

Posted on 2021-09-24 by jcs

I should have been suspicious. The Minions have been uncharacteristically quiet lately and behaving themselves; until they weren’t. Then, of course, they sprung another light-mode/dark-mode post on me. It turns out there are a lot of sociopaths out there. Here’s … Continue reading →

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Drawing Diagrams in Emacs

Posted on 2021-09-23 by jcs

Junji Zhi has an interesting post on drawing diagrams in Emacs. He wanted to draw diagrams for system modeling and do it from within Emacs. There are several ways of accomplishing that but Zhi chose Mermaid. It basically provides a … Continue reading →

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Iteration with Elisp

Posted on 2021-09-22 by jcs

John Kitchen has important things to do so naturally he’s procrastinating. That’s probably bad for him but it’s good for us because he has another Elisp video up. This one considers various ways of iterating in Elisp. Earlier, he had … Continue reading →

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String Formatting

Posted on 2021-09-21 by jcs

One of the things we programmers do all the time is to build strings of the sort In a survey of 342 programmers, 312 preferred Emacs. where the two numbers and the string “Emacs” are variables. If, like me, you … Continue reading →

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The COVID-19 Disinformation Campaign

Posted on 2021-09-20 by jcs

I’ve written several times about the origin of COVID-19 but there are still no answers. What has become clear, however, is that we’ve been subjected to an organized disinformation campaign. In February of 2020 The Lancet published a letter from … Continue reading →

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Embracing the Emacs Way

Posted on 2021-09-19 by jcs

If you’re looking for an introduction to The Way of Emacs, there’s a long article that explores the Emacs way and why it’s worthwhile embracing despite what seems, at first, to be a formidable learning curve. There are a couple … Continue reading →

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Annotating a Text File

Posted on 2021-09-18 by jcs

Chewxy had a need to annotate a text file. He wanted to mark a rectangle of text, capture a classification type, and write the results to a JSON file. He thought about writing a Web app to do it but … Continue reading →

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Reverse Warrants Explode

Posted on 2021-09-17 by jcs

The new hotness in law enforcement is reverse warrants. Those are warrants that aren’t targeted at an individual but specify some criterion and seek to identify all individuals who meet that criterion. The most common example is the so-called geofence … Continue reading →

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The Placement of Quotation Marks

Posted on 2021-09-16 by jcs

I’m pretty much a strict constructionist when it come to grammar issues but there are exceptions. I’m not above starting a sentence with “And” or “But” and my comma usage is driven by what I see as logical and making … Continue reading →

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