Author Archives: jcs

Google and Warrants

Posted on 2013-01-27 by jcs

It’s become fashionable of late to beat up on Google and wonder aloud what happened to their celebrated “Don’t be evil” motto. Google provides a slew of useful services and the price we pay is to have our digital existences … Continue reading →

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Department of Red Meat

Posted on 2013-01-26 by jcs

Heh Heh. I know, I know; I’m evil but I couldn’t help myself.

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Short Stories

Posted on 2013-01-25 by jcs

This is a collection of short observations that don’t merit a post of their own but that some may nevertheless find interesting. Social Science Here, in case you were wondering, is why most rational people consider the term “social science” … Continue reading →

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A Xah Lee Challenge

Posted on 2013-01-24 by jcs

Over at ergoemacs.org, Xah Lee posses the following challenge: Find a simple and general method to create the following text. (global-set-key (kbd “<menu> g a”) “A”) (global-set-key (kbd “<menu> g b”) “B”) (global-set-key (kbd “<menu> g c”) “C”) (global-set-key (kbd … Continue reading →

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A Real World VimGolf Challenge

Posted on 2013-01-23 by jcs

In my CUA Mode Video post, I mentioned that the pointer to the video came from a comment to one of the posts in the Google+ Emacs Community. That post asks for advice on the best way of changing a[0] … Continue reading →

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CUA Mode Video

Posted on 2013-01-22 by jcs

Over at the Google+ Emacs Community, Jean-Sébastien Ney (in a comment to this post) gives us a pointer to a very nice video on CUA-mode by Mark Mansour. Actually, the video really deals with the rectangle features of CUA-mode that … Continue reading →

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Mickey’s VimGolf 4

Posted on 2013-01-21 by jcs

Mickey’s getting into VimGolf mode with another solution to a VimGolf Challenge. I was looking at this same challenge for a possible post but Mickey beat me too it and with a very nice strategy. The challenge is to take … Continue reading →

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Why People Pirate

Posted on 2013-01-20 by jcs

Back in the beginning of January, I wrote about iiNet walking out of talks with Hollywood. The talks were Hollywood’s effort to strong arm Australian ISPs into spying on their customers to help “combat piracy.” The most compelling point that … Continue reading →

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Ebooks and PDF

Posted on 2013-01-19 by jcs

I’ve written before about the deplorable production values in ebooks: misspellings, poor typography, missing words, terrible spacing, and a general lack of cohesiveness in the finished product. The problem is particularly acute with technical books as Tim Evans-Ariyeh points out … Continue reading →

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Sorting Rectangles

Posted on 2013-01-18 by jcs

Mickey has a nice solution to the last VimGolf in Emacs challenge. It certainly doesn’t win on total keystrokes but it does demonstrate a really powerful method for solving problems like the challenge. Mickey uses sort-regexp-fields to sort parts of … Continue reading →

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