Author Archives: jcs

Pictures of NSA Corrupting New Networking Equipment

Posted on 2014-06-08 by jcs

We knew about the NSA’s intercepting network equipment and installing backdoor hardware before shipping it on to its intended destination. The idea, of course, was to enable easy access to networks that would otherwise hard to exploit. The NSA describes … Continue reading →

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The PhD Movie

Posted on 2014-06-07 by jcs

If you’ve been a graduate student since the late 1990’s, you’re probably familiar with PhD Comics, a comic drawn by Jorge Cham that captures the absurdities of his graduate studies in a way that will resonate with any graduate student. … Continue reading →

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Magnar Continues His WebRebels Videos

Posted on 2014-06-06 by jcs

The estimable Magnar Sveen has, to use his words, come out of hibernation and continued the posting of his WebRebels talk. This video is part 5 of the series. It’s been a while so if you don’t remember, the official … Continue reading →

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Mutable String and Emacs Buffer Passing Style

Posted on 2014-06-05 by jcs

Speaking of Christopher Wellons, he’s got a very interesting post over at null program on mutable strings and Emacs buffer passing style. Wellons starts by pointing out that strings in Emacs Lisp, like many other languages, have a fixed size … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Christopher Wellons

Posted on 2014-06-04 by jcs

The invaluable Sacha Chua has posted another in her series of Emacs chats. This time it’s with Christopher Wellons. As regular readers know, I’m an admirer of Wellons and have written about him several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). … Continue reading →

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Grant Rettke’s Take on Narrowing to Multiple Regions

Posted on 2014-06-03 by jcs

Grant Rettke has his own take on a function to enable narrowing to multiple regions of a buffer. I learned about the idea from comments to a post on another matter and wrote about it here. Rettke takes the example … Continue reading →

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Turning On Undo in a Temporary Buffer

Posted on 2014-06-02 by jcs

Today I learned something new from a short post on Xah Lee’s blog. The idea is that you’ve written a command that generates output in a temporary buffer and you want to enable the undo function for the buffer so … Continue reading →

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Second Year of Daily Posts

Posted on 2014-06-01 by jcs

Today is the second anniversary of daily posts on Irreal. For the past two years, Irreal has published at least one post a day. Last year I remarked that it was a lot harder than one would think. Nothing that’s … Continue reading →

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Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth

Posted on 2014-05-31 by jcs

Over at Informit they’ve got a great Q&A with Donald Knuth. Twenty luminaries in computer science ask Knuth questions about himself, his work, and computer science. The questions are much more interesting than the usual session of this sort so … Continue reading →

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org-ref

Posted on 2014-05-30 by jcs

I’ve written previously about John Kitchin and how he uses Emacs and Org mode for reproducible research. Kitchen is a researcher in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University so he writes a lot of technical papers and he uses Org … Continue reading →

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