Author Archives: jcs

Emacs for Prose

Posted on 2011-05-27 by jcs

Urpo Lankinen over at the Avarthrel Blog has a post about coming home to Emacs for writing prose—specifically novels. Although he’s a longtime Emacs user, he’s long been wandering in the wilderness looking for a good writer’s editor. Emacs was … Continue reading →

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Another Emacs Trick

Posted on 2011-05-26 by jcs

I just stumbled across another feature of Emacs that is new to me. If you save files by typing C-x s, then for each dirty buffer Emacs will ask if you want to save it. By answering d Emacs will … Continue reading →

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A Practical Application of Gray Codes

Posted on 2011-05-25 by jcs

Gray codes are a way of encoding a a sequence of integers {0, 1, 2, …, n} so that the binary representation of adjacent integers differs by only 1 bit. For example, the1 Gray encoding for the sequence {0, 1, … Continue reading →

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Expanding File Names in Guile

Posted on 2011-05-24 by jcs

I really like Guile but one very annoying thing about it is that it doesn’t expand file paths. If you want to load a file outside the current directory you have to specify the complete path. Emacs has a very … Continue reading →

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Literate Programming and GTD With Org Mode

Posted on 2011-05-23 by jcs

Over at Eden Cardim’s Blog, there are a couple of nice posts about GTD (Getting Things Done) with Emacs Org Mode. One interesting thing about the posts is that Cardim uses the Literate Programming approach to his .emacs file but … Continue reading →

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Boolean Functions

Posted on 2011-05-22 by jcs

Boolean functions are very simple. If B = {FALSE, TRUE } then a Boolean function of n variables has domain Bn and range B; that is f: Bn → B. This limits the number of possible functions. For example, there … Continue reading →

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Huffman Coding

Posted on 2011-05-21 by jcs

Over at Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, Steven Pigeon has a nice post on Huffman codes. He explains how Huffman codes operate and works through a pencil and paper example. Because he doesn’t give a real implementation and because the usual … Continue reading →

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Heaps and Priority Queues

Posted on 2011-05-20 by jcs

In a previous post, I talked about FIFO queues and gave an implementation. Now I want to talk about another type of queue: the priority queue. In these queues every element has a priority and elements are removed from the … Continue reading →

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Sedach on Lisp Macros

Posted on 2011-05-19 by jcs

Via Loper OS, here’s Vladimir Sedach on Lisp macros. He points out that the purpose of programming is automation and that once having realized that the next question is, “How can we automate our programming?” Sedach goes on to argue … Continue reading →

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Cleaning Up My Emacs Environment

Posted on 2011-05-18 by jcs

While I was installing magit the other day, I decided it was a good time to do a little digital house cleaning. I keep all my important file groups—writing, software development, blogging, and personal—in Git repositories. Oddly, given that these … Continue reading →

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