Author Archives: jcs

Hyphenating Word Phrases

Posted on 2013-12-02 by jcs

Some word phrases should be hyphenated. For example, you should write “an end-to-end solution” rather than “end to end solution.”1 If you’re like me, you almost always forget about the hyphenation initially and just type “end to end” without stopping … Continue reading →

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A History of T

Posted on 2013-12-01 by jcs

I recently ran across a fascinating history of T, a Scheme-like Lisp dialect that preceded Common Lisp, over at Paul Graham’s blog. It was written by Olin Shivers who is well-known in the Scheme community and is the founding author … Continue reading →

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Ten Rules for Reproducible Research

Posted on 2013-11-30 by jcs

Those of you have been around for a while know I’m a big fan of reproducible research. I’ve written about it here, here, here, here, here, and here. Now Anton Nekrutenko, James Taylor, and Eivind Hovig have a nice article … Continue reading →

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Notes on the Sacha-Magnar Interview

Posted on 2013-11-29 by jcs

Sacha Chua has posted a followup to her interview with Magnar Sveen. It’s basically a set of topic headings that index into the video of the interview. That’s very nice because if you want to revisit a particular part of … Continue reading →

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A YASnippet Tutorial

Posted on 2013-11-28 by jcs

Matthew Keeler has posted a nice introduction to writing YASnippets. Keeler starts with a minimal snippet that simply includes the GPL 3 boiler plate in the file and then moves on to a for loop snippet for C/C++ that uses … Continue reading →

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Coping With the NSA Dragnet

Posted on 2013-11-27 by jcs

Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall, and Martin Heinrich have an interesting Op-ed in The New York Times entitled End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now. In it they say that they believe the NSA’s collection of telephone call metadata is a clear … Continue reading →

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More Site Tuning

Posted on 2013-11-26 by jcs

Since I tuned up the caching software for Irreal.org I’ve seen a significant improvement in download speeds. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen some problems with client-side caching. After I add a new post and reload the site, I see the previous … Continue reading →

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Counting Check Marks

Posted on 2013-11-25 by jcs

Here’s my solution to the last EmacsGolf challenge. I used the apparently little-known how-many command. I normally use how-many in Elisp to count the occurrences of some regex. Here’s an example from my old blog that leverages some code from … Continue reading →

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Experience With flx-ido

Posted on 2013-11-24 by jcs

After watching Sacha Chua’s interview with Magnar Sveen, I wrote that Sveen had demonstrated some Emacs features that I wanted to try out. One of those was flx-ido. The flx package was written by Le Wang to bring Sublime Text’s … Continue reading →

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The NSA and Terrorism Fear Mongering

Posted on 2013-11-23 by jcs

Whenever ordinary folks push back against—or even question—the NSA’s extralegal surveillance of innocent citizens they are always told that it’s to protect them from terrorists. “Don’t let there be another 9/11,” they say. “Really,” they assure us, “it’s for your … Continue reading →

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