Author Archives: jcs

Benchmarking in Emacs

Posted on 2019-03-27 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has posted an instructive article on benchmarking Elisp code. He had a theory on the run time of alternative implementations for some code he’d written and rather than wave his arms, he did what we all tell … Continue reading →

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Employees Hate Open Offices

Posted on 2019-03-26 by jcs

I’m not sure why I bother but here’s another report (from last year) belaboring the obvious: workers hate open office spaces. They hate them for all the obvious reasons: too much noise, lack of privacy, lack of ability to concentrate, … Continue reading →

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Vivek Haldar Reads “Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control”

Posted on 2019-03-25 by jcs

Last week, I wrote about Vivek Haldar’s reading of Dijkstra’s famous paper, “Go to Statement Considered Harmful.” It turns out that Haldar has a series of posts like that in which he reads a foundational paper from Computer Science. One … Continue reading →

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Taking Notes in LaTeX

Posted on 2019-03-24 by jcs

This is astounding. Gilles Castel uses LaTeX to take notes in his Math classes. These aren’t simple notes with a smattering of elementary math symbols; they’re notes for classes like Complex Variables and other advanced topics. Take a look at … Continue reading →

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Deleting Blank Lines

Posted on 2019-03-23 by jcs

The Learn Emacs Twitter feed has a handy tip for dealing with blank lines: Making & Deleting blank lines: If your point/cursor lies within several blank lines C-x C-o will delete all but one blank line, another C-x C-o will … Continue reading →

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Release Candidate 1 for Emacs 26.2 Is Out

Posted on 2019-03-22 by jcs

Nicolas Petton announced on the Emacs-Devel list that Emacs 26.2 RC1 is out. If you verify Nico’s signature—as you should—you’ll notice that GPG says the key has expired. As Nico explains, the key is still good but the GNU keychain … Continue reading →

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An Application of Bayes’ Theorem to Differential Privacy

Posted on 2019-03-21 by jcs

In a nice followup to yesterday’s post about differential privacy, John Cook, the proprietor of the Data Privacy Twitter feed, has a nice post that uses Bayes’ Theorem to implement a simple differential privacy scheme. The problem is to gather … Continue reading →

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Differential Privacy

Posted on 2019-03-20 by jcs

One of the tough problems in ethical data gathering is how to collect statistics while respecting the privacy of those the data is being gathered from. It’s widely known that most forms of data anonymization are not robust and that … Continue reading →

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Numbering Org Table Rows

Posted on 2019-03-19 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez tweeted a handy tip that I used to know about but had forgotten: #emacs multiple cursors + org tables = magic `mc/insert-numbers’ is bound to # when multiple cursors are active: https://t.co/Okx9sZ2TQW pic.twitter.com/WhMmKwjLMV — Alvaro Ramirez (@xenodium) March … Continue reading →

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Running Your Life With Emacs

Posted on 2019-03-18 by jcs

I’ve written a lot about how I hate leaving Emacs and find that its consistent UX and key bindings make a huge difference in the efficiency of my workflow. Not everyone agrees. Many people think I’m being overly sensitive when … Continue reading →

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