Author Archives: jcs

Welcome to Emacs Development

Posted on 2015-01-05 by jcs

Back when Emacs moved from Bazzar to git, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote a short introduction to Emacs development. I meant to write about it but lost track of the post. Happily, I’ve found it again and am posting about it to … Continue reading →

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Finite State Machine Parsers

Posted on 2015-01-04 by jcs

Back when I was programming network code in C, one of my favorite strategies was to to implement protocol processing as a finite state machine. I found the design was always easier to understand and modify, often by simply changing … Continue reading →

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Attack on the Scientific Method

Posted on 2015-01-03 by jcs

I just read a horrifying article in Nature. The article, Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics, recounts an effort among some theoretical physicists to redefine the scientific method so that it no longer requires experimental verification or even that … Continue reading →

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Multiple Info Buffers

Posted on 2015-01-02 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork), who’s an occasional commenter here on Irreal, has an interesting post on his info workflow. He likes to have multiple info buffers open at the same time. That may seem a little odd but as Borkowski explains, … Continue reading →

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Using Emacs to Run a Course

Posted on 2015-01-01 by jcs

Via Sacha I found this really interesting post by John Kitchin, whose work Irreal has mentioned many times. In this post, Kitchin writes about how he used Emacs to run a graduate course in Chemical Engineering. Emacs was used to … Continue reading →

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Happy New Year

Posted on 2014-12-31 by jcs

Have a Happy New Year and be careful out there.

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Safely Loading Your Emacs Configuration

Posted on 2014-12-31 by jcs

Over at the Emacs Reddit, tending asks how to fall back to a known good Emacs configuration when initialization gets an error. His complaint is that if there’s an error early in his .emacs file, the initialization is aborted and … Continue reading →

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Using AUCTeX

Posted on 2014-12-30 by jcs

Piotr Kaźmierczak has a nice post on why Emacs is the ultimate LaTeX editor1. The idea is that adding AUCTeX to the greatest editor in the world gives you an incredibly powerful LaTeX environment. Kaźmierczak is a Mathematician so his … Continue reading →

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LaTeX vs. Word

Posted on 2014-12-29 by jcs

In an act that I’m sure was designed to throw me into a fit of rage, Markus Knauff and Jelica Nejasmic published An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development in PLOS ONE. The paper … Continue reading →

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A New Emacs Blog

Posted on 2014-12-28 by jcs

Oleh Krehel (abo-abo) has a new blog, (or emacs. There’s only a few posts so far but they’re really excellent. For example, his initial post discusses his packaging of ace-window into a library so that other packages can use the … Continue reading →

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