Category Archives: General

What’s It Take?

Posted on 2016-06-05 by jcs

Those of us in the US have ample reason to despair of our legislators’ willingness to collude with the NSA in the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment. But at least our congress draws the line when it comes to spying … Continue reading →

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A Checklist for Backdoor Proposals

Posted on 2016-06-04 by jcs

The ludicrous and unworkable Burr-Feinstein bill appears dead, a victim of its “do magic somehow” prescriptions and a lack of support from the White House and intelligence agencies. Nonetheless, we can expect more of the same perhaps even from the … Continue reading →

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Date Calculations in Org

Posted on 2016-06-02 by jcs

One of the things that always causes confusion and that is hard to find in the documentation is making date calculations in Org. I was reminded of that when I saw a reddit question on making date calculations in an … Continue reading →

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Filling and Unfilling Paragraphs with Emacs

Posted on 2016-06-01 by jcs

Like me, Artur Malabarba is a heavy user of fill paragraph. I don’t use visual-line-mode when I’m writing so every time I make an edit I refill the paragraph. Malabarba apparently does the same but being Malabarba has found a … Continue reading →

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Thought for the Day

Posted on 2016-05-31 by jcs

Kontra has a nice quote from Vernon Sanders Law: "Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." — Kontra (@counternotions) May 30, 2016

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Malabarba: Mastering Emacs Review

Posted on 2016-05-30 by jcs

A year ago, Mickey Petersen published Mastering Emacs, an excellent book for beginning and intermediate Emacs users. Oddly, although I’ve seen many tweets praising it, I haven’t seen any reviews. Happily, the prolific Artur Malabarba has remedied that. If you … Continue reading →

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You Must Use Emacs or Vi

Posted on 2016-05-29 by jcs

Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post recounting my observation that the best developers tended to use either Emacs or Vim (and back then, possibly TextMate on OS X). I speculated that that might be because excellent developers choose … Continue reading →

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Writing A Custom Emacs Package

Posted on 2016-05-28 by jcs

Al Scott is an Emacs user and JavaScript developer who’s interested in using the TDD method. He likes to use Mocha to run JavaScript scripts for testing. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do that from Emacs so Scott decided … Continue reading →

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Scientific Illiteracy (2)

Posted on 2016-05-27 by jcs

Remember a couple of years ago when I wrote despairingly of American scientific illiteracy and the fact that 1 in 4 Americans didn’t know that the earth revolves around the sun? I was pretty certain that that represented the infimum … Continue reading →

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Emacs as a (Python) IDE

Posted on 2016-05-26 by jcs

A couple of years ago, Drew Werner gave a nice talk to the New York Emacs Meetup group on An Intelligent Python IDE with Emacs, Projectile, and Jedi. I came across a reference to it today and watched the video … Continue reading →

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