Author Archives: jcs

Living the Lisp Machine Environment

A little while ago I wrote about Martin Fowler’s post on InternalReprogrammability that celebrated Emacs reprogrammability and its recapitulation of the Lisp Machine environment. That capability is of more than theoretical importance as I, once again, discovered. Long time readers … Continue reading

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A Groups Magic VimGolf in Emacs Challenge

Here’s a simple ViGolf challenge that has a simple solution in Emacs. Given (a) (abc) (abcd) (123456) turn it into ___ _____ ______ ________ That is, replace everything in the sexpr with an underscore. This is really easy with Emacs … Continue reading

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Google and Warrants

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

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

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Short Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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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