Author Archives: jcs

Magit Tutorial

Posted on 2013-06-07 by jcs

John Stevenson over at jr0cket has a nice Magit tutorial up. If you’re using Emacs and Git then you definitely need to check out Magit. I get mine from Melpa but the link above leads to the Git repository if … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.8 Is Out

Posted on 2013-06-06 by jcs

I just updated my Common Lisp system, SBCL, to the latest version, 1.1.8. Between now and the last update, I had upgraded OS X to Mountain Lion. That, of course, meant that I had to reload GCC and the other … Continue reading →

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VimGolf in Emacs

Posted on 2013-06-05 by jcs

It’s been a while since we Emacs enthusiasts have locked horns with the users of that other editor. Here’s a simple VimGolf challenge to warm us up. Starting with the buffer one two three end up with (one) (two) (three) … Continue reading →

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Tail Call Optimization in Elisp

Posted on 2013-06-04 by jcs

If you’ve got a Lisp background—especially a Scheme background—you may have internalized recursion as a looping mechanism and general programming strategy. That doesn’t work with Elisp, of course, because each recursive invocation allocates a stack frame. Not to worry, though, … Continue reading →

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Elisp for Common Lisp Programmers

Posted on 2013-06-03 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis Tweets a thought about Common Lisp programmers learning Elisp that seems to me to be exactly right. I’ve expressed the same idea myself but not nearly as succinctly or neatly.

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Responsible Disclosure

Posted on 2013-06-02 by jcs

Most Irreal readers are familiar with the concept of responsible disclosure: the idea that if you discover an exploitable flaw in a site or piece of software, you should contact and inform the folks responsible for the site or software … Continue reading →

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A Year of Posts

Posted on 2013-06-01 by jcs

A year ago today I gave myself a challenge: make at least one post to Irreal every day for a year. Yesterday’s post successfully completed that challenge. It was harder than I thought. The experience has given me a new … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chua Chats With Bastien Guerry

Posted on 2013-05-31 by jcs

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Org Mode, here’s a bit of the back story. Carsten Dominik, an astronomer, originally wrote Org Mode as a small extension to outline-mode to help with his note taking and list management … Continue reading →

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A Smarter Way to Move to BOL

Posted on 2013-05-30 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at the excellent Emacs Redux has a particularly good tip on improving move-beginning-of-line (mapped to 【Ctrl+a】 by default) so that it moves first to the leading non-blank character of the line and then to the absolute beginning … Continue reading →

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A Query for Mac Emacs Users

Posted on 2013-05-29 by jcs

I was just reading Bozhidar Batsov’s latest post on deleting whitespace—nice tip on just-one-space by the way—and noticed that he had to rebind just-one-space from 【Meta+Space】because that key sequence is reserved by the OS X for Spotlight. I’ve observed that … Continue reading →

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