Author Archives: jcs

A Conversation with Mickey

Posted on 2022-11-21 by jcs

Syntopikon has an interesting interview with Mickey Petersen, the proprietor of Mastering Emacs and all around Emacs expert and expositor. He’s no stranger to Irreal readers so it’s always nice to see him discuss matters. The last time I remember … Continue reading →

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Replying to a Sender Specific Email Address

Posted on 2022-11-20 by jcs

Sebastian Schulze has an interesting post on handling email To and From addresses. His procedure when supplying an Email address to, say, a Website such as some-site.com is to specify some-site.com@his-domain.com where his-domain.com is his domain. That allows him to … Continue reading →

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Fred Brooks

Posted on 2022-11-19 by jcs

Fred Brooks was a computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the development of OS/360. He’s probably best known for his influential book The Mythical Man-Month, which has itself obtained a mythical status within our industry. The TL;DR of … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: JavaScript

Posted on 2022-11-18 by jcs

With all the Sturm und Drang about Twitter, it’s time for Irreal to provide a little red meat—not about Twitter but about JavaScript: BREAKING: JavaScript has been banned from Twitter for impersonating a real programming language. pic.twitter.com/ukInCxvf1B — Lukas Eder … Continue reading →

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A New Take On Quitting Vim

Posted on 2022-11-17 by jcs

Finally! A new take on the quitting Vim meme: I believe AGI will develop the ability to prevent humans from terminating it. After all vim got 60% there with a fraction of compute resources. — Ferenc Huszár (@fhuszar) November 15, … Continue reading →

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Mike Zamansky Is Retiring

Posted on 2022-11-16 by jcs

Mike Zamansky, who is well known to Irreal readers for his excellent, some say definitive, Using Emacs Series just announced that he is planning on retiring at the end of the Spring semester. In a series of three posts Zamansky … Continue reading →

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Solving Problems With Some Quick Elisp

Posted on 2022-11-15 by jcs

I often read complaints about how hard it is to learn Elisp and that therefore we should rewrite Emacs in Javascript or something equally silly. The fact is, of course, that Elisp, like most Lisps, is actually easy to learn … Continue reading →

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Killing Processes From Within Emacs

Posted on 2022-11-14 by jcs

Okay, okay: I’m weak and can’t stick to even the promises I make to myself. This is yet another post on Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command framework. Yesterday, it was combining JPEGs into a single PDF file; today it’s killing processes from … Continue reading →

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Combining Jpegs

Posted on 2022-11-13 by jcs

I keep promising myself that I’m not going to publish anymore posts about Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command articles but he keeps finding compelling new applications for it. The latest is a problem I often have: combining several JPEG images into a … Continue reading →

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A Dictionary and Thesaurus for Emacs

Posted on 2022-11-12 by jcs

Ben Simon has a post that hits two of my blogging hobby horses at once. The post is about his recent adoption of define-word and powerthesaurus. The first way it resonates with me is that Simon, like me, finally got … Continue reading →

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