Author Archives: jcs

Learning Elisp Idioms

Posted on 2012-02-02 by jcs

I’ve said before that Emacs Lisp is pretty much like any other Lisp except for its library, which is specialized for editing tasks. One of the things I like about Xah Lee’s Emacs Lisp Tutorial is that it doesn’t concern … Continue reading →

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TSA: So Incompetent It Surprises Even Me

Posted on 2012-02-01 by jcs

We here at Irreal, like almost everyone else in the world, are not fans of the Transportation Security Administration. Their ability to combine heavy-handedness with incompetence exceeds even that of the typical DMV office. Still, the sheer assclownery of their … Continue reading →

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Digital Lysenkoism

Posted on 2012-01-31 by jcs

Cory Doctorow has a splendid article in Publishers Weekly about the futility of DRM in the publishing industry. In it he compares the industry’s belief in DRM to the disastrous beliefs of Trofim Lysenko, the Stalin-era Russian pseudo-geneticist, that led … Continue reading →

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Fontifying Code Buffers In Emacs Org Mode

Posted on 2012-01-30 by jcs

I just learned a nice trick from the Org Mode Mailing List. By default code blocks in Org-mode buffers are colored gray and don’t show the fontification the way it does in a normal programming buffer. But if you add … Continue reading →

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TechCrunch: Amazon Is Out To Kill Publishers

Posted on 2012-01-29 by jcs

Regular Irreal readers know that publishing and its travails are an enduring interest of mine. As I’ve said many times, I like publishers and wish them well but at the same time I recognize that they are making the same … Continue reading →

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Journal Article On Org Mode

Posted on 2012-01-28 by jcs

The Journal of Statistical Software has a nice paper by Carsten Dominik (the creator of Org mode), Eric Schulte, Dan Davison, and Thomas Dye about Org Mode and its use in Literate Programming and Reproducible Research. I really like the … Continue reading →

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Emacs Rocks Episode 9 Is Up

Posted on 2012-01-27 by jcs

Magnar Sveen has another episode of his excellent Emacs Rocks up. In this video he talks about expand-region, an Emacs package that he wrote to help with marking text in an intelligent way. The video is less than 3 minutes … Continue reading →

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What Makes Emacs So Great?

Posted on 2012-01-26 by jcs

Over at The Setup they are featuring Phil Hagelberg who has an especially nice take on what makes Emacs so great. He says that Emacs is as close as you can get on modern systems to the fully dynamic environment … Continue reading →

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Demand Curves By Age

Posted on 2012-01-25 by jcs

H S Dent has a set of endlessly fascinating demand curves that show the demand for various kinds of consumer goods by the age of the consumer. Many of these are pretty much what you’d expect: demand for bicycles, for … Continue reading →

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Russ Cox: Part 4 Of A Trilogy

Posted on 2012-01-24 by jcs

As long time readers know, I am a big fan of Russ Cox’s work. In particular, his 3 part series on implementing regular expression search is just outstanding. Now Cox has added a fourth article to the series that describes … Continue reading →

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