Category Archives: General

The Last Answer

For some reason The Last Answer, an Isaac Asimov short story from 1980 was popping up on the Internet this week. Oddly, I’d never read it before and being an Asimov fan, I thought I’d read most of his fiction. … Continue reading

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EmacsGolf 4

Xah Lee is doing some refactoring and wants to change this ;; define several class of keywords (defvar mylsl-keywords ‘(“break” “default” “do” “else” “for” “if” “return” “state” “while”) “LSL keywords.”) (defvar mylsl-types ‘(“float” “integer” “key” “list” “rotation” “string” “vector”) “LSL … Continue reading

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Giant Emacs Reference Sheet Revised

We here at Irreal are big fans of Aaron Hawley’s Giant Emacs Reference Card and have often written about some of the tidbits contained therein. Now Hawley has announced that he’s revised the reference and added another 500 commands for … Continue reading

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Maintaining My Blog Post Queue

Because inspiration doesn’t necessarily strike on demand, I like to stay a few posts ahead. For the last year, my procedure was to push a completed post to the site as a draft and then publish it when I was … Continue reading

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Xah Lee on Defining Super and Hyper Keys

If, like me, you are always writing little pieces of Elisp to do some task or another or if you have a lot of ELPA packages installed, chances are it’s hard to find key sequences for them. In theory, 【Ctrl+c】 … Continue reading

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The Worst Password Tips

Mark Burnnet has an interesting post on The Worst Password Tips. His main thesis is that much—or even most—of the advice you hear about choosing passwords is no longer good advice. It used to be that passwords like p@r013 gave … Continue reading

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Outage Status Update and After Action Report

I’m happy to report that I can again log into the administrative page. I’ve released everything in the moderation queue and cleaned up a bit of a mess that I left while I was trying to figure out how to … Continue reading

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A Simple Explanation of One-Way Functions and Their Application to Passwords

John Graham-Cumming has a very nice 4-part series on one-way functions and their application to passwords. The explanation is completely non-mathematical and should be understandable by anyone. By the end of the third post, Graham-Cumming has explained how a simple … Continue reading

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Paredit and Multiple Cursors

Brian Zwahr has an outstanding Emacs Rocks! type video up on using Paredit and Multiple Cursors together. This is excellent. He shows how to combine simple functions from each into a really powerful tool. Like Sveen’s masterpieces, the video is … Continue reading

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My Solution to EmacsGolf 3

Here’s my solution to the EmacsGolf 3 challenge. When I first saw Saul’s post, the first thing that popped into my mind was that this is the classic use case for a keyboard macro. The only problem is that each … Continue reading

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