Author Archives: jcs

Steve Jobs

Posted on 2011-10-06 by jcs

I awoke this morning to the sad new that Steve Jobs had died. Of course, I was shocked but as Charlie Stross points out, I shouldn’t have been Once his illness became public knowledge his level of activity, already frenetic, … Continue reading →

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The Emacs interactive Special Form

Posted on 2011-10-05 by jcs

Xah Lee has an interesting post that taught me something I already knew. The problem that Lee deals with is how to write an Emacs command (that is, a function callable by, say, 【Meta+x】 and the function name) that is … Continue reading →

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A Cool Common Lisp Tip

Posted on 2011-10-04 by jcs

I wrote the other day about Zach Beane’s new Common Lisp Tips blog. Yesterday, he had a really nifty tip that solves a common problem. We’ve all had situations where we want to output something like Processed 1 file. or … Continue reading →

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Inserting Quotation Marks In Emacs Org Mode

Posted on 2011-10-03 by jcs

As I was writing yesterday’s post I started to enter \rdquo{} to get an opening double quotation mark for what seemed like the millionth time. I suddenly realized that this was really stupid and a waste of time so I … Continue reading →

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PostScript And PDF

Posted on 2011-10-02 by jcs

I’ve read several times that PDF is “just compressed PostScript” but I recently learned that that’s not true. David Evans has a nice article over at Adobe on PostScript vs. PDF. Evans starts off by describing what PostScript is and … Continue reading →

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Two Great New Lisp Blogs

Posted on 2011-10-01 by jcs

Recently, Zach Beane and stassats have started new blogs about Common Lisp and Slime. Beane, the well-known Xach, is writing the Common Lisp Tips blog, which promises a new Common Lisp tip every day. As of today, there are only … Continue reading →

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Emacs As A Lisp Machine

Posted on 2011-09-30 by jcs

Xah Lee has an update to his Emacs and Unicode Tips page that I’ve written about before on my old blog. This is a great reference that tells you how to deal with Unicode and UTF-8 in Emacs. One of … Continue reading →

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Power Update

Posted on 2011-09-29 by jcs

Two weeks ago I wrote about power management in electronic devices. The thrust of that post was that because battery technology hasn’t advanced very much it was necessary to work on the problem at the other end by making our … Continue reading →

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Google Contacts And Emacs

Posted on 2011-09-28 by jcs

As a dweller in the Apple ecosystem (or walled garden if you prefer) I enjoy a shared and automatically synced contacts list across my Macs, iPhone and iPad. Therefore I don’t bother with Google contacts. Many people do, though, and … Continue reading →

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Scheme Versus Common Lisp

Posted on 2011-09-27 by jcs

A lot has been written about Scheme versus Common Lisp and the subject has achieved holy war status much like that of the Emacs versus Vi crusades. I use and am happy with both. I like that Scheme is a … Continue reading →

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