Author Archives: jcs

Torstein Johansen on Dumb-jump

Posted on 2023-03-18 by jcs

Torstein Johansen has a short video on one of my favorite navigation packages. These days, everyone appears to want Emacs to offer the completion of those LongAndStupidFunction.names beloved by Javanistas and others. You can’t blame them, of course, but that … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: What Are They Expecting?

Posted on 2023-03-17 by jcs

This probably isn’t really a Red Meat Friday item—unless you’re a dentist—but it is, nevertheless, pretty funny and perfectly captures a common but annoying occurrence at the dentist’s office: any word yet on what a dentist is expecting when he … Continue reading →

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A Short Rant on Passwords

Posted on 2023-03-16 by jcs

It’s been a while since I’ve grumped about the dumb password rules you find on some sites. They have limits on password length, insist on some custom requirement concerning the number of digits, capital letters, and special characters, or, worst … Continue reading →

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Dashes

Posted on 2023-03-15 by jcs

It will not be news to Irreal partisans that we here at Irreal are enamored of em-dashes. Some say that they are seldom used but I love em-dashes and probably tend to overuse them. Back in the dark ages before … Continue reading →

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Asimov’s Three Laws and the Future

Posted on 2023-03-14 by jcs

I just came across this link to a 1965 short BBC interview of Isaac Asimov concerning his famous three laws of robotics. Those laws, as Asimov stipulates, are purposefully ambiguous to that he can use that ambiguity as a vehicle … Continue reading →

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Removing Emacs Key Bindings

Posted on 2023-03-13 by jcs

Once you’ve been sucked into the event horizon of your Emacs configuration, you’re always adding new bindings. Sometimes it’s for a homegrown function, sometimes it’s to configure a new package. If you longer needed one of those bindings, it’s trivial … Continue reading →

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Using Org Mode

Posted on 2023-03-12 by jcs

Aditya Athalye has a long(ish) and interesting post on how he uses org mode for writing and more. Like many of us, Athalye has used a lot of apps for keeping notes and publishing his blog and slides for his … Continue reading →

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Org Pretty Table

Posted on 2023-03-11 by jcs

Just a quickie today about something you may or may not care about. The reason you may not care about it is that it only affects the display of your local Org buffer—in particular, the display of tables. If you’re … Continue reading →

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Happy 50th Birthday to Dark Side Of The Moon

Posted on 2023-03-10 by jcs

Every year on this date, Irreal interrupts its normal programming to celebrate the birthday of Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon. As I’ve mentioned before, the album is one of the best selling albums of all time. It … Continue reading →

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The Programmer Who Broke The Internet

Posted on 2023-03-09 by jcs

I just came across a story that offers us several lessons. It’s a tale about a programmer who withdrew a trivial function from NPM and subsequently caused several applications to fail. Some of failures were second order effects in that … Continue reading →

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