Author Archives: jcs

Undoing Git Actions

Posted on 2015-06-23 by jcs

Git is a wonderful thing and despite its reputation for being really hard to use, is easy to understand and use for the usual cases. The problems occur when you make a mistake and the easy mental model you have … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Trust Us—We’re Wise

Posted on 2015-06-22 by jcs

The next time the government asks you to trust in their good and mature judgment, remember this.

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Org and Beamer

Posted on 2015-06-22 by jcs

Presentation software. Windows has Power Point, Apple has Keynote, and Linux has Open Office. Everyone hates presentation software and everyone uses it. If you’re someone who works on multiple platforms, you might have to learn to use two or more … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

I.F. Stone, Call Your Office

Posted on 2015-06-21 by jcs

Glenn Greenwald has a blistering evisceration of the recent (UK) Sunday Times front page article claiming that the Russians and Chinese have cracked the Top Secret cache of Snowden documents and that MI6 is pulling out their officers to prevent … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Computer Security and the U.S. Government

Posted on 2015-06-20 by jcs

If you’re interested in security, you really should subscribe to the semiweekly SANS Newsbites newsletter. The subscription is free except for the occasional email notifications of SANS courses and events. Each letter comprises a series of short (typically a paragraph … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Handy Calc Tip

Posted on 2015-06-19 by jcs

mxavier has a nifty tip for calc: Tiny but nice #emacs TIL: in calc-mode, y will insert the current calculation into the buffer from which you called calc-mode. — mxavier (@mxavier) June 12, 2015 It’s hard to put a lot … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Storing and Retrieving Files by Tags

Posted on 2015-06-18 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes points us to this interesting paper on tag-based file systems. The idea is that rather than storing files in the traditional hierarchical manner, they are stored and retrieved by tags. The idea of tags is quite general and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Adding Custom CSS to a WordPress Site

Posted on 2015-06-17 by jcs

When I first started blogging with WordPress, I needed some custom CSS. Being a WordPress n00b, I simply added it to the theme’s CSS file that controls what the site looks like. Of course, that bad decision came back to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Sacha on Supplying an Argument to a Capture Template Function

Posted on 2015-06-16 by jcs

Org mode capture templates are more flexible than you might think. You can specify that the entry be stored in a file in a variety of ways. You can, for instance, ask that it be put in a date tree … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Writing Mastering Emacs

Posted on 2015-06-15 by jcs

Mickey Petersen has a really interesting post on the technical details of how he wrote Mastering Emacs. It’s not surprising that he used Emacs, of course, but less obviously he chose reStructedText as his source format. That choice was driven … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment