Author Archives: jcs

Ant Bridges

Posted on 2024-09-02 by jcs

This is doubtlessly beyond the remit of Irreal but it’s so interesting I thought I’d write about it anyway. It’s about ants, for crying out loud but take a look and see if you don’t find it interesting too. As … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Writing Studio Is Finished and Available

Posted on 2024-09-01 by jcs

I’ve written about Peter Prevos and his Emacs Writing Studio several times [1, 2, 3, 4 ]. It’s a series of articles on using Emacs for long form writing. Now, happily, Prevos has announced that the project—or at least the … Continue reading →

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Remote Emacs in Terminal Mode

Posted on 2024-08-31 by jcs

There are some people who prefer to run Emacs in terminal mode. I have no problem with that but I do think that GUI Emacs has so much more to offer that it’s usually the best choice. Sometimes there’s no … Continue reading →

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Profiling Garbage Collection

Posted on 2024-08-30 by jcs

Gene Goykhman over at Flaky Goodness has a nice hint on profiling garbage collection but the technique is more generally applicable. Goykhman wanted to know how much time he was spending in garbage collection while exporting his blog. It turns … Continue reading →

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Updating Builtin Packages

Posted on 2024-08-29 by jcs

Charles Choi has a very informative post on the Emacs upgrading policy a very informative post on the Emacs upgrading policy. The TL;DR is that by default Emacs’ package.el will not upgrade packages that are builtin. Org is an example … Continue reading →

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Partying Like It’s The Last Century

Posted on 2024-08-28 by jcs

It’s hard to be too cynical about the security practices of software vendors: even those selling “security” solutions. Although most Irreal readers probably know a lot more about good security practices than the average user, security is a difficult discipline … Continue reading →

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Schneier On Staying Safe On The Internet

Posted on 2024-08-27 by jcs

There may be more knowledgeable people on security than Bruce Schneier but hardly any of them are talking to us. They mostly work for the NSA or its brethren or they’re cybercriminals. Happily, Schneier does talk to us and he … Continue reading →

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Ten Coding Fonts

Posted on 2024-08-26 by jcs

A perennial topic of interest to programmers is their coding font. I’ve been using Inconsolata for as long as I can remember. I adopted it when I was still a Vim user and carried it over to Emacs. In my … Continue reading →

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Nothing Today Because I’m Exhausted

Posted on 2024-08-25 by jcs

Yesterday was a lost day. I haven’t been happy with my WiFi router so I got a new one and yesterday was the day that I was going to spend an hour or so installing it and updating my network. … Continue reading →

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Why Isn’t Lisp Used More In Production Redux

Posted on 2024-08-24 by jcs

I just came across an excellent Medium article by Kenichi Sasagawa that addresses the question of Why Isn’t Lisp Used More In Production that I wrote about the other day. My post took the somewhat cynical view that Lisp lost … Continue reading →

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