Author Archives: jcs

Using Request to Download Financial Data

Posted on 2018-05-25 by jcs

Sebastian Schweer has a nice post on using the

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Going Dark: How Many Locked Phones Are There?

Posted on 2018-05-24 by jcs

In news that will surprise exactly no Irreal readers, the Washington Post and Techdirt are reporting that the FBI has been lying about the “going dark” problem. One of their favorite refrains is that terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and whatever … Continue reading →

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Reproducible Research for Management

Posted on 2018-05-23 by jcs

The utility of reproducible research and literate programming methods in engineering and science is clear and well known by now but we seldom consider how the techniques might be extended to other disciplines. If, however, you think about what you’re … Continue reading →

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Reproducibility Using GNU Guix

Posted on 2018-05-22 by jcs

Regular readers know I’m fond of reproducible research and occasionally write about it. Unfortunately, I often write as if reproducible research is simply a matter of firing up Emacs and Org mode. It is, of course, a lot more complicated … Continue reading →

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Python Doctests, Literate Programming, and Org Mode

Posted on 2018-05-21 by jcs

If you’re a Python programmer and like to have built-in tests for your functions, you probably know about doctest, a way of embedding one or more tests in the docstring of a Python function. Normally, they don’t do anything but … Continue reading →

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Introduction to Using Git

Posted on 2018-05-20 by jcs

If you’re in the intersection of Emacs and Git users, you are almost certainly using Magit and probably don’t think about version control very much: it just works. But suppose your version control experience is restricted to CVS, SVN, or … Continue reading →

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Capturing Code Snippets

Posted on 2018-05-19 by jcs

The other day in my post about Alain Lafon’s talk on playing Emacs like an instrument—you have watched that video, haven’t you?—I mentioned that one of the things I picked up was an Org capture template for capturing code snippets. … Continue reading →

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A Tip for Org Mode N00bs

Posted on 2018-05-18 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes serves up some useful advice for those just starting out with Org mode: It's too easy to get excited about time tracking, tags, and literate programming when starting out with org-mode. It has a huge featureset. I'd encourage … Continue reading →

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Some Dired Tips

Posted on 2018-05-17 by jcs

Tim Visher, who used to produce the popular VimGolf in Emacs Videos, has a couple of useful tips about using dired: #emacs: In dired, `w` copies the file to the kill ring (and clipboard if you have that set up), … Continue reading →

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California Stores the DNA of All Babies Born in the State

Posted on 2018-05-16 by jcs

What could go wrong? The iron law of data collection, that’s what. It’s been a while since I’ve written about the iron law, so here’s a quick recap: The iron law states: Whenever the government (or anyone else for that … Continue reading →

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