Author Archives: jcs

Why C?

Posted on 2018-03-26 by jcs

Even though I mostly program in some form of Lisp these days, the majority of my programming over the years was in C. That’s not hard to understand: most of my work involved low level communications software such as radio … Continue reading →

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It Can Be Done

Posted on 2018-03-25 by jcs

The Dutch people have done a remarkable thing and as such serve as an inspiration to the rest of us. This week the voters rejected a bill that would have given the government sweeping powers to wire tap their citizens … Continue reading →

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A Reasonably Safe Windows Email Reading Environment

Posted on 2018-03-24 by jcs

If you are unfortunate enough to work in a Windows/Outlook/Exchange/MS Office/Adobe/Flash environment, you know that you are constantly at risk of being infected with email viruses. Needless to say, no system is completely secure but there are safer alternatives. Of … Continue reading →

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Calc For Programmers

Posted on 2018-03-23 by jcs

After writing about Florian Adamsky’s post on acronyms in AUCTeX, I snooped around on his site and came across a nice post on Emacs Calc from a programmer’s and computer scientist’s point of view. As regular readers know, I’ve been … Continue reading →

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New Release of Org Mode

Posted on 2018-03-22 by jcs

Bastien tweets that there’s a new Org mode release: #orgmode #emacs 9.1.8 is out, with important bugfixes for those using group tags (I know you are…) Enjoy! — Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) March 22, 2018 It’s already available in Org ELPA … Continue reading →

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Acronyms in LaTeX Documents

Posted on 2018-03-21 by jcs

Florian Adamsky has a very nice post on handling acronyms in LaTeX documents. Good style dictates that the first time you use an acronym, you should provide the full written out definition. Later instances can just use the acronym. That’s … Continue reading →

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RC1 for Emacs 26.1

Posted on 2018-03-20 by jcs

Eli Zarestskii has announced that barring any difficulties coming to light, the Emacs 26.1 RC1 should be released next week. Zarestskii expects that that will be followed in short order by the release of Emacs 26.1 itself. Relative newcomers to … Continue reading →

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Lightweight Literate Programming with Hydras

Posted on 2018-03-19 by jcs

Grant Rettke has an interesting take on abo-abo’s Hydra package. His idea is that you can use hydras for a sort of lightweight literate programming. Most Irreal readers are already aware of hydras’ utility as a way of gathering related … Continue reading →

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Exactly!

Posted on 2018-03-18 by jcs

Karl Voit captures my feelings about Emacs exactly: Seeing #Emacs as an #editor is like seeing a car as a seating-accommodation.#PIM #orgmode #informationcentric #vim #editorwar #IDE #opensource — Karl Voit (@n0v0id) March 4, 2018

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Auto-Yasnippets

Posted on 2018-03-17 by jcs

I stumbled across the package Auto-YASnippet, by the prodigious abo-abo, again the other day. I vaguely remember reading about it a couple of years ago when it was first released. The idea is to create a temporary yasnippet on the … Continue reading →

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