Author Archives: jcs

Patent Trolls Want To Rewrite The IPR

Posted on 2025-11-26 by jcs

As we all know, one of the scourges of our industry is the Non-Practicing Entity (NPE) better known as the patent troll. Given that by definition NPEs don’t produce anything except lawsuits, their activities are deeply corrupting of a system … Continue reading →

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Casual CSV

Posted on 2025-11-25 by jcs

Charles Choi is back with another app in his Casual Suit.This time it’s Casual CSV, a front end for csv-mode. As Choi says, CSV is a seemingly simple format but the rules are really fussy and easy to violate. That’s … Continue reading →

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A Revival Of Blogs?

Posted on 2025-11-24 by jcs

John Lampard over at disassociated has a post about the renaissance of blogging in general and wonders if niche blogs are next. I was a bit surprised by that because I wasn’t aware that blogs went anywhere. Perhaps I’ve got … Continue reading →

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Is Markdown Really Holding You Back?

Posted on 2025-11-23 by jcs

Brian Hogan has a post that I, at least, find provocative. His thesis is that Markdown—and by extension, Org-mode—are holding you back because they’re not semantic. That’s true, in a way, I guess, but both Markdown and Org-mode are Markup … Continue reading →

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Infix Versus Prefix Operators

Posted on 2025-11-22 by jcs

Over at the Lisp subreddit, Combinatorilliance asks if there are any studies addressing the question of whether infix or prefix notation is easier to read and understand. There are, of course, fierce partisans on both sides of the question. We … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Cloudflare And AWS

Posted on 2025-11-21 by jcs

I’m sure that every Irreal reader is aware of the recent Internet outages caused by problems at AWS and Cloudflare. Most of those readers also know that things happen. Servers fail, cables break, backhoes wreak havoc, software runs up against … Continue reading →

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Destroying Value Wherever They Go

Posted on 2025-11-20 by jcs

As I’ve said many times, management is a necessary part of any successful business, especially any large business. After all, someone has to set the goals, make all the mundane decisions, and do all the politics that would bore an … Continue reading →

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Calc As A Desktop App

Posted on 2025-11-19 by jcs

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a big fan of Emacs Calc. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to master Calc in its entirety. That’s mostly because it has many advanced features that I seldom or never … Continue reading →

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A Reminder About org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift

Posted on 2025-11-18 by jcs

JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why has a useful reminder about something that I, at least, always forget about: org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift. The idea is that you have something scheduled on a certain day but want to repeat that … Continue reading →

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Burst-driven Development

Posted on 2025-11-17 by jcs

Most serious Emacs users are familiar with Bozhidar Batsov. He’s a blogger and the developer/maintainer of several OSS and Emacs projects such as RuboCop, CIDER, Projectile, nREPL, and many others. And, of course, he has a full time job. That … Continue reading →

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