Category Archives: General

History of BSD Unix

Posted on 2015-06-12 by jcs

I just stumbled across a nice Salon article on the history of BSD Unix. The article is from 2000 but still very interesting and relevant. Although it examines many of the key players in project, especially Bill Joy, the theme … Continue reading →

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The Editor Wars

Posted on 2015-06-11 by jcs

Colin Weir nicely captures the absurdity of the editor wars: @marcoarment We also argue which 1970s text editor is best to use in a 1990s emulator of a 1980s terminal — Colin Weir (@radiocolin) May 18, 2015

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Filtering by Tag in EShell

Posted on 2015-06-11 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nifty bit of Elisp that allows you to filter on file tags in eshell. As an example of his idea, suppose I want to list all my blog posts with a tag of “Emacs”. I can … Continue reading →

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Congratulations

Posted on 2015-06-10 by jcs

to Maryam Mirzakhani for winning the Fields Medal, generally considered the highest honor that a mathematician can receive. The fact that Mirzakhani is the first woman to win it makes the award even sweeter.

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Message Mode

Posted on 2015-06-10 by jcs

mbork has a nice post on message-mode. The mode is meant to support email message editing. As mbork explains, there are several functions that make manipulating a message buffer easier. He’s using it with mu4e but notes that it’s handy … Continue reading →

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Moving from Vim to Emacs with Evil

Posted on 2015-06-09 by jcs

Aaron Bieber, an engineer from Wayfair, gave a great talk to the Boston Vim Meetup on his journey from Vim to Emacs. Bieber was a serious Vim user who had about 15 years experience with it. During that time he’d … Continue reading →

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I Know the Feeling

Posted on 2015-06-08 by jcs

Here at the International Irreal Headquarters, we’ve felt this way for some time: In a few years there'll be enough computers in your home that getting hacked and being haunted will be functionally indistinguishable. — Cliff (@moonpolysoft) September 14, 2014

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LaTeX Templates

Posted on 2015-06-08 by jcs

If you’re a beginning or intermediate LaTeX user, you can probably produce pretty nice looking documents as long as the document is one of the standard types. If you want to produce slightly unusual documents—a homework assignment or résumé, say—you’ll … Continue reading →

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Prevent Encryption Above All Else

Posted on 2015-06-07 by jcs

Michael Steinbach, assistant director in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, recently testified that law enforcement’s challenge is working with tech companies to prevent encryption above all else. I take that to mean that he’s taking exception to companies like Apple providing … Continue reading →

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Why You Shouldn’t Use the Cloud

Posted on 2015-06-06 by jcs

Karl Voit has a nice post that tells us why we shouldn’t trust or use the cloud. There are lots of reasons why we might want to use the cloud and most of us are familiar with them: lots of … Continue reading →

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