Author Archives: jcs

Garbage Collection and Your Refrigerator

Posted on 2014-10-19 by jcs

Jonathan Magen has a nice introduction to garbage collection. In it he illustrates various garbage collection strategies by using the same algorithm to get rid of old food in the refrigerator. It’s not a deep technical discussion but is perfect … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.4 RC1

Posted on 2014-10-18 by jcs

As promised, Emacs 24.4 RC1 was released on Friday. If all goes well, we’ll have the official release of 24.4 on Monday. There’s a lot of great improvements in the new release so, like most Emacers, I can hardly wait … Continue reading →

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Tricorder!

Posted on 2014-10-17 by jcs

Ooh, I want one.

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Elisp and the Clojure Threading Macros

Posted on 2014-10-17 by jcs

One set of Clojure features that its adherents are quite fond of is the threading macros ->, ->>, and –>. Unless you’re familiar with Clojure, you probably don’t know what they do. You might wonder why we should care. The … Continue reading →

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A Tip on Editing Org Mode Table Formulas

Posted on 2014-10-16 by jcs

Rob Syme offers up a tip about editing org-mode table formulas that everyone should know but many don’t: TIL you can use C-c ' to edit #emacs #orgmode table formulae in a more spacious buffer. It will also highlight cells … Continue reading →

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Sharpening the Knife

Posted on 2014-10-16 by jcs

SQLite, a C library that implements an SQL database engine, is the most widely deployed database engine in the world. The system is extraordinarily stable. One of the reasons is that although SQLite contains about 89.9 KSLOC it has 91493.0 … Continue reading →

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If Programming Languages Were Cars

Posted on 2014-10-15 by jcs

I probably shouldn’t but I love this sort of thing and find many of the entries hilarious.

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Global Key Bindings

Posted on 2014-10-15 by jcs

Over at the Google G+ Emacs community Alison Chaiken points us to an interesting post by Akkana Peck. Many times, I’ve set a key sequence for some function—often the recommended key sequence—only to have some other module steal it out … Continue reading →

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Golden Keys and the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse

Posted on 2014-10-14 by jcs

Recently, The Washington Post published an editorial suggesting that Apple, Google, and other smart phone manufacturers provide a golden key to allow law enforcement access to locked phones. “Golden Key,” of course, is just a euphemism for a backdoor. It’s … Continue reading →

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Burritos and Monads

Posted on 2014-10-13 by jcs

Ahh, now I get it "A burrito? What's that? Sorry, I'm new to Mexican food." "Well, it's a bit complicated, but to start with, a burrito is like a monad…" — Fiora‮☄anreteA (@FioraAeterna) September 6, 2014

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