Author Archives: jcs

Is The TSA Finished?

Posted on 2012-12-08 by jcs

I know, I know: I’m courting a comeuppance from Betteridge’s Law but this is too good to ignore. Christopher Elliot at Linked in has an interesting post in which he posits that the TSA, as we know it today, can’t … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Let’s Play Ivmgolf

Posted on 2012-12-07 by jcs

After my last VimGolf post I thought it would be fun to try another so I headed over to the VimGolf site to find a challenge. The first one I stumbled across was Let’s play some Imvgolf. The challenge is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 5 Comments

Autocompleting

Posted on 2012-12-06 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice post on the various methods of autocompleting in Emacs (search for 2012-12-01). Most Emacs users will be familiar with the majority of the material but it’s helpful to have it all written down in one … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 3 Comments

New Emacs Movie: Dired

Posted on 2012-12-05 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim has started “season two” of his Emacs Movies. This is the second section that will describe various Emacs modes and tools such as Dired Org-mode Eshell Diary Calc Ediff Gnus Vmail Erc BBDB Info His latest movie is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

More News From the Cursive Front

Posted on 2012-12-04 by jcs

Yahoo News has an interesting article on the cursive wars. Should cursive handwriting be abandoned as an anachronism or should it be preserved as an important life skill? Regular Irreal readers already know where I stand on the matter but … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 9 Comments

Icomplete Mode

Posted on 2012-12-03 by jcs

Per Xah Lee (search for 2012-11-28), I’ve experimentally turned on icomplete-mode. I’m not sure how I like it so I haven’t included it in my init.el file yet. According the internal documentation, icomplete-mode “implements a more fine-grained minibuffer completion feedback … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 3 Comments

SBCL 1.1.2 Is Released

Posted on 2012-12-02 by jcs

Christophe Rhodes is announcing that he has released Steel Banks Common Lisp 1.1.2. You can get the release at the SBCL Download Page. As always, installation is simple. I did my usual dance of sh make.sh cd test sh run-tests.sh … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

C++ Craziness

Posted on 2012-12-01 by jcs

If someone asked you to write a C++ program to output the squares of the numbers from 0 to 9, what would it look like? Vivek Haldar, whose work I’ve cited approvingly several times (1, 2, 3), has an answer. … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Let’s Play VimGolf

Posted on 2012-11-30 by jcs

Or VimGolf in Emacs anyway. Over at Life seen through a coder’s eyes, Yassine Chaouche poses the following problem. Starting with an Emacs buffer containing only [[Image(grep_1.png)]] end up with [[Image(grep_1.png)]] [[Image(grep_2.png)]] [[Image(grep_3.png)]] [[Image(grep_4.png)]] [[Image(grep_5.png)]] [[Image(grep_6.png)]] [[Image(grep_7.png)]] [[Image(grep_8.png)]] Chaouche solves … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 4 Comments

Mawking AWK with Lisp

Posted on 2012-11-29 by jcs

Back in 2009, Brendan O’Connor over at AI and Social Science posted an article entitled Don’t MAWK AWK—the fastest and most elegant big data munging language! He recently posted an update that caused the original article to pop up on … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment