Author Archives: jcs

First Emacs 24 Pretest Is Available

Posted on 2011-09-26 by jcs

Chong Yidong is reporting that Emacs 24.0.90, the first Emacs 24 pretest, is available for download at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-24.0.90.tar.gz. As usual, the changes are listed in etc/NEWS. In the comments to my post about Emacs 24 features, several of the commenters … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

SICP For The Kindle And iPad

Posted on 2011-09-25 by jcs

Long time readers know that I am a big fan of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and that I consider it the best book ever written about computer programming. I have the on-line version permanently bookmarked … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged SICP | 3 Comments

More On The Demise Of Handwriting

Posted on 2011-09-24 by jcs

Earlier this month I wrote a post speculating on the end of handwriting. By “handwriting” I mean cursive handwriting. Although I’ve pretty much stopped using a pen or pencil entirely most people are still at least printing things by hand. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Xah’s Emacs Quiz

Posted on 2011-09-23 by jcs

Xah Lee has another Emacs challenge. This time, it’s to replace entries of the form <tr><td>pound</td><td>£</td><td>pound sign, U+00A3</td></tr> with entries like this: <tr><td>pound</td>£<td>pound sign, U+00A3</td></tr> This is, presumably, a small tweaking of Lee’s very useful page on HTML/XML Entities that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 1 Comment

Setting The Goal Column In Emacs

Posted on 2011-09-22 by jcs

As you move vertically from line-to-line, Emacs tries to keep the point in the same column position or as near to it as it can. Normally, that’s what you want to have happen but sometimes it’s convenient to have the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 2 Comments

An Application Of Benford’s Law

Posted on 2011-09-21 by jcs

Benford’s Law is a surprising result that says data from many sources have the leading digit distributed in a non-uniform way. For example, the first digit is 1 30% of the time but 9 less than 5% of the time. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

More SSH Tricks

Posted on 2011-09-20 by jcs

Tycho Garen has a nice post with some SSH tricks to make your life easier. This serves as an excellent follow on to my previous post on the subject. There’s a bit of overlap but enough new material that it’s … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

Emacs Keybindings for Mac OS X

Posted on 2011-09-19 by jcs

As many Mac OS X/Emacs users know, OS X has many of the Emacs key bindings defined for the entire system. Thus, bindings like 【Ctrl+f】, 【Ctrl+b】, 【Ctrl+a】, 【Ctrl+e】, 【Ctrl+k】, 【Ctrl+y】, 【Ctrl+p】, 【Ctrl+n】, and a few others work across the whole … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 4 Comments

The Emacs `goto-line` Command

Posted on 2011-09-18 by jcs

As I’ve written before, I came to Emacs after years as a Vi/Vim user. One of the things I was used to doing in Vim was to go to line N in a file by typing :N in command mode. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 6 Comments

Managing Workshifting

Posted on 2011-09-17 by jcs

In a recent post about workshifting I mentioned that one of the impediments to wider adoption is a fear on the part of managers that they won’t be able to effectively manage their employees if they can’t reach out and … Continue reading →