Author Archives: jcs

The Google Billboard Puzzle

Posted on 2012-07-02 by jcs

A recent Programming Praxis problem resurrected the famous Google billboard puzzle. Back in July of 2004, Google put up billboards all over the country reading {FIRST 10-DIGIT PRIME IN CONSECUTIVE DIGITS OF E}.COM Those who solved the problem and followed … Continue reading →

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Programming Metric: -2000 LOC

Posted on 2012-07-01 by jcs

Over at Folklore, Andy Hertzfeld has a wonderful story about management’s obsession with non-sensible programming metrics. Who among us has not, at one time or another in our career, been subjected to a manager who thought that lines of code … Continue reading →

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A New Emacs Trick

Posted on 2012-06-30 by jcs

Well, new to me anyway. Xah Lee and the folks over at the ErgoEmacs Google+ Group discovered a nifty Emacs command (apparently from a Sacha Chua tweet) that does something I’ve often wanted to do. Suppose you want to kill … Continue reading →

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Google: Hardware Manufacturer

Posted on 2012-06-29 by jcs

Robert McMillan over at Wired Enterprise has an interesting article in which he reports that Google claims to be one of the world’s largest hardware makers. We’ve all heard stories about how Google custom builds much of its equipment but … Continue reading →

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Video Chat on Emacs

Posted on 2012-06-28 by jcs

The ever energetic Sacha Chua has a nice video chat up with John Wiegley about Emacs. Wiegley, the author of eshell, is one of those users who pretty much lives in Emacs and he has spent a lot of time … Continue reading →

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Newspapers

Posted on 2012-06-27 by jcs

As longtime readers of Irreal know, I have a fascination for the various media and how they are coping in the digital age. One of the media sectors about which I haven’t had much to say is newspapers. Mostly that’s … Continue reading →

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Dribble

Posted on 2012-06-26 by jcs

Nicholas May, on his blog Because two cents wasn’t enough, reminds me of something I’d long forgotten: The dribble command in Common Lisp. What dribble does is record a Lisp session much like the Unix script command or the Scheme … Continue reading →

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More On Lexical Scoping

Posted on 2012-06-25 by jcs

Yesterday I posted a reminder about Yoo Box’s excellent article on lexical binding in Emacs 24. I recently came across a post by Sergey M over at On elisp and programming in general that also considers lexical scoping in Emacs … Continue reading →

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A Reminder About Lexical Scoping in Emacs

Posted on 2012-06-24 by jcs

Back in January, I wrote a short post recommending Yoo Box’s piece on lexical scoping in Emacs 24. Now that Emacs 24 is officially released, this seems like a good time to remind folks about Box’s post. If the idea … Continue reading →

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How To Design a Successful Programming Language

Posted on 2012-06-23 by jcs

Sooner or later, every programmer gets bitten by the “I want to design a programming language” bug. Sadly, most of these efforts, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, and Yukihiro Matsumoto notwithstanding, will come to naught. Now Caleb Garling reveals the … Continue reading →

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