Author Archives: jcs

Sharp Quote and Emacs

Posted on 2014-11-17 by jcs

Artur Malabarba has some good advice on sharp quoting Elisp functions. It’s common for Elisp programmers to use a single quote (i.e the quote form) to mark functions. Malabarba explains why it’s better practice to use #’ (i.e. the function … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Amazon and the Publishers

Posted on 2014-11-16 by jcs

Over at Vox.com, Matthew Yglesias has a provocative article on the contretemps between Amazon and the publishing industry and with Hachette in particular. It’s mainly been portrayed in the press as an argument over prices but Yglesias says that’s just … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Being Smart

Posted on 2014-11-15 by jcs

Matt Blaze has a realization that probably applies to us all. I know it applies to me. I was about to say "how can something be 'smart' if it doesn't work unless it's connected to the net" but then I … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Day of the Year

Posted on 2014-11-15 by jcs

This is really a note to myself. The other day I needed to figure out what day of the year it was. I was pretty sure that the Unix date command could tell me but I couldn’t remember how to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Using Emacs and Org Mode for a Journal

Posted on 2014-11-14 by jcs

Howard Abrams has an excellent post on journaling with Emacs and Org Mode. The post documents how his use of Org Mode evolved over time so you can see what (at least for him) worked and didn’t work. That’s very … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Counting Spanning Trees

Posted on 2014-11-13 by jcs

I really enjoy Atabey Kaygun’s blog. If you like Mathematics and Lisp, you’re sure to enjoy it too. A typical post looks at a mathematical problem and either presents a solution or experiments with the problem with Common Lisp. One … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Org Mode and Reproducible Research

Posted on 2014-11-12 by jcs

EmacsNYC has another great video up. This time, its Evan Misshula talking about Org-mode and reproducible research. Misshula is a graduate student in Criminal Justice at CUNY who does a lot of statistical research on Criminal Justice matters. Like me, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs on Git

Posted on 2014-11-11 by jcs

It’s been a long time coming but as of today, Git will be the official repository for Emacs. It’s easy to miss what a monumental achievement this is. It would be easy to shrug off the news with a so … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 4 Comments

IE on Mac

Posted on 2014-11-10 by jcs

Why?

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Building gnuplot on OS X

Posted on 2014-11-10 by jcs

As part of my on-going efforts to get my new MacBook Pro set up with my normal working environment, I tried to compile gnuplot. The first problem was that libpng and libgd were not installed so there was no png … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment