Author Archives: jcs

Get Rid of the TSA Before They Kill Us

Posted on 2012-11-27 by jcs

As regular readers know, we here at Irreal are not fans of the TSA. Apparently, Charles Kenny at BloombergBusinessweek isn’t a fan either. He’s posted an article entitled Airport Security Is Killing Us in which he makes the case that … Continue reading →

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Using the Keypad

Posted on 2012-11-26 by jcs

Xah Lee has an interesting post on defining keys to open frequently used files (search for 2012-11-21). The idea is that you add lines like (global-set-key (kbd “<kp-7> <kp-3>”) (lambda () “” (interactive) (find-file “~/web/ergoemacs_org/emacs/blog.html”))) for each of the files … Continue reading →

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Debating Copyright Without the RSC

Posted on 2012-11-25 by jcs

I recently wrote about an excellent policy brief published by the Republican Study Committee that discussed copyright. Sadly, the RSC withdrew the brief within 24 hours after heavy complaints from lobbyists for big media. Now, Techdirt, which also covered the … Continue reading →

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The Y-Combinator

Posted on 2012-11-24 by jcs

Jim Weirich, of Neo gave a really nice talk on The Y-Combinator at RubyConf2012. Given the venue, the examples are, of course, in Ruby but you should have no difficulty following them: I know no Ruby at all but was … Continue reading →

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Why We Use IDEs

Posted on 2012-11-23 by jcs

Wille Faler over at recursivity.com has a nice post on IDEs and why we need them. His take is that if you need an IDE it’s because of shortcomings in the language you’re using. He has in mind, of course, … Continue reading →

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Bashisms

Posted on 2012-11-22 by jcs

Russell Power over at rjpower.org has a nice post on some Bash tricks. Despite over 20 years of Bash use I learned something new. It turns out that if you type【Ctrl+x Ctrl+e】Bash will bring up an editor session that allows … Continue reading →

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SICP and Why It Matters

Posted on 2012-11-21 by jcs

Brian Harvey, who has been teaching the Berkeley SICP course for 25 years has an interesting and moving tribute to the famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which he calls the best computer science book in the world. Irreal … Continue reading →

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Republicans: Copyright Skeptics?

Posted on 2012-11-20 by jcs

See the afterward below for the latest information on this. Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog by conservative lawyers, Stewart Baker writes that Republicans are repudiating 40 years of tougher copyright laws. If that’s true it can only … Continue reading →

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Amazon and DRM

Posted on 2012-11-19 by jcs

Over at Attendly.com John Birmingham has a provocative article entitled When It Comes To DRM, Amazon Is A Bottom Feeding Hell Beast. That is, to put it mildly, a bit hyperbolic but Birmingham has a serious point. A point that … Continue reading →

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Xah’s Unicode Gallery

Posted on 2012-11-18 by jcs

Speaking of Unicode, as I did yesterday, Xah Lee has updated and rearranged all his pages dealing with Unicode and added a single, unified Unicode Gallery & Tutorial index page. I really like this because it provides a single page … Continue reading →

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