Author Archives: jcs

Xah Lee on Docstring Markup

Posted on 2014-05-27 by jcs

If you write Emacs functions—even for yourself—you are, of course, including a docstring. Functions have a way of escaping from your init.el and finding their way to someone else’s config. Even if that doesn’t happen you may find yourself happy … Continue reading →

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Night of the Scum Spammer

Posted on 2014-05-26 by jcs

Irreal is undergoing a sustained spam attack again. This is despite the nucaptcha, which is still working. Either the spammers have defeated it or they’re paying a bunch of people a penny a piece to fill them in. In either … Continue reading →

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Geek Porn

Posted on 2014-05-25 by jcs

If you’re a geek you gotta love this whether or not you’re a Formula 1 fan. I’ve written about Formula 1 racing before so this is two more times than I expected to have anything to say about it. It’s … Continue reading →

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The Effectiveness of Dynamic Typing

Posted on 2014-05-24 by jcs

As I wrote the other day, there has been, of late, an ongoing, vigorous debate on the virtues of dynamic versus static typing. There are a lot of muscular declarations from both sides but not a lot of evidence. Now … Continue reading →

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Navigating with ace-jump-mode

Posted on 2014-05-23 by jcs

This is by way of an obvious Emacs tip. While I was in my emacs.el adding ace-windows, I decided to fix a problem with ace-jump-mode as well. When I first installed it I used【Ctrl+x Space】as the triggering key sequence. Somewhere … Continue reading →

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Some Notes On ace-window

Posted on 2014-05-22 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about ace-window, a really nice way of quickly jumping from one window to another. I used the suggested key sequence 【Meta+p】 to trigger it so it seemed pretty fast. After using it for a while, … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Bozhidar Batsov

Posted on 2014-05-21 by jcs

Sacha Chua has posted the latest episode in her Emacs Chats series. This time it’s with Bozhidar Batsov, who, among other things, runs the excellent Emacs Redux blog. Batsov is also the author of the prelude, projectile, and cider packages … Continue reading →

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Bjarne Stroustrup on Linked Lists

Posted on 2014-05-20 by jcs

Suppose you have a large, sorted sequence of integers that you wish to store in memory. You need to be able to efficiently add and delete elements to and from the sequence while keeping it sorted. What data structure would … Continue reading →

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Getting Stable Packages from MELPA

Posted on 2014-05-19 by jcs

I get most of my packages from the MELPA repository and I’m very happy with the results. Some folks object to MELPA because the repository has snapshots of the packages that may not be stable. I’ve seldom had any problems … Continue reading →

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Transparency Database

Posted on 2014-05-18 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about the increased commitment to transparency being exhibited by many of the tech companies. Silk is a platform for visualizing information interactively. The staff at Silk has put together a database of information on government requests for … Continue reading →

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