Category Archives: General

Google To Kill Google Reader

Posted on 2013-03-14 by jcs

Google has announced that they are shutting down Google Reader in July. I spend a lot of time in Reeder, which depends on Google Reader as a backend. I’ve seen some suggestions for alternatives—NewsBlur seems to be an early favorite—but … Continue reading →

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Big Media and the User Experience

Posted on 2013-03-13 by jcs

Those of you who have been around Irreal for a while know that one of my favorite comics from The Oatmeal deals with what happens when an otherwise honest person tries to buy a video of Game of Thrones. It … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.3

Posted on 2013-03-12 by jcs

By now you all probably know that Emacs 24.3 is out. This is a substantial release with lots of new goodies. I could write a long blog post about them but fortunately Mickey has has already done the work so … Continue reading →

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Help From Phil

Posted on 2013-03-11 by jcs

Regular reader Phil offers some help on help in the comments to the vc-annotate post. The first suggestion is something I think he’s mentioned before but that I promptly forgot. I often want to look at the source code that … Continue reading →

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Git as a Function Data Structure

Posted on 2013-03-10 by jcs

Philip Nilsson over at Jayway has an illuminating post about git. His idea is that git is best understood as a purely functional immutable data structure (like a CL list). That probably doesn’t seem very promising but he makes a … Continue reading →

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More on Quickdocs

Posted on 2013-03-09 by jcs

Recently I mentioned the Quicklisp indexing site Quickdocs. Since then, Fukamachi has continued to improve the site. He’s added categories so that you can browse the list of all libraries concerned with, say, Graphics. That gives you an idea of … Continue reading →

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Emacs: The Portable Development Environment

Posted on 2013-03-08 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about the video chat between Sacha Chua and Avdi Grimm. The take away from that post was vc-annotate, a powerful Emacs tool that hooks into your version control’s annotation facility. Right at the end of the chat—about … Continue reading →

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vc-annotate

Posted on 2013-03-07 by jcs

The Internet’s tireless blogger Sacha Chua has another interesting video chat about Emacs. This time it’s with Avdi Grimm, a well-known Ruby guru and Emacs user. The video is informative and definitely worth 40 minutes of your time so give … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.3 Release Candidate 1

Posted on 2013-03-06 by jcs

Emacs 24.3 Release Candidate 1 is available for FTP download. If all goes well, the developers expect to release 24.3 in about a week. Consider jumping in to help with the final testing if you can.

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The Emacs Logo

Posted on 2013-03-05 by jcs

After all the heavy breathing about Emacs UI issues recently, here’s a softer, gentler Irreal take on Emacs bling. If, like almost everybody, you’re invoking Emacs from some sort of GUI you’ve undoubtedly seen the Emacs logo. I’ve pretty much … Continue reading →

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