Author Archives: jcs

Zamansky: Elisp 17

Posted on 2024-01-26 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is back is back with part 2 of his thesaurus project. In his last video he started a project to explore using Web APIs. He chose to implement a thesaurus to illustrate the concepts and used the Merriam-Webster … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs For Writers

Posted on 2024-01-25 by jcs

Fedora Magazine has an interesting article in which a journalist, odisej, discovers using Emacs as his writing tool. His article is a sort of perfect case study because odisej has no real technical background so his take on using Emacs … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

NASA Coding Standards

Posted on 2024-01-24 by jcs

In my A Fatal C Error post I talked about how hard it is to write error-free C code. Any large C program is almost guaranteed to have undetected errors. That’s true of all languages—TeX is famous for being the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Reinstall Packages

Posted on 2024-01-23 by jcs

Someone posted a link to an old Bozhidar Batsov post that discusses a nifty little function that automates a simple but annoying manual process. Those of you who use package.el or the use-package macro are probably familiar with the problem. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Lab Notebooks

Posted on 2024-01-22 by jcs

I love the idea of lab notebooks. I was trained in the sciences but that training was in Mathematics so the idea of lab notebooks didn’t play much of a role. In the experimental sciences and most engineering disciplines, they … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Hiding Files From Dired Display

Posted on 2024-01-21 by jcs

Emacs Elements has a short video that explains something I didn’t know. You can tell Dired to not display certain files. My first thought was, “Why would I want that?” After all, if you have a file you probably want … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Quick Accents

Posted on 2024-01-20 by jcs

As I mentioned previously, I’m learning Spanish so worrying about accented characters has become a way of life. The above post talks about one of Prot’s videos that discusses how to change the input method for Emacs only rather than … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs 29.2

Posted on 2024-01-19 by jcs

Good news from Eli Zaretskii. In a post to the Emacs Devel list he announced that Emacs 29.2 has been released and is ready for downloading. It’s a maintenance release that fixes some bugs but there are no new features. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Zamansky: Learning Elisp #16

Posted on 2024-01-18 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is back after the holidays with another video on learning Elisp. This video starts a new project on using Web APIs in an Elisp application. Specifically, the purpose of the project is to implement an interactive thesaurus that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Another C Failure

Posted on 2024-01-17 by jcs

As a sort of coda to yesterday’s post on the errors in the C code running the Toyota acceleration system, here’s another example of a spectacular failure in C code that resulted in huge losses for AT&T, caused loss of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment