Category Archives: General

The Greatest Innovation

Chris Dixon asks “What would be the greatest technological leap you’d have to explain to someone who time traveled from the 1950’s?” It’s hard to argue with his answer. It surely has changed everything.

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UPS and the Traveling Salesman

If you know anything at all about United Parcel Service you know that they put a lot of effort into optimizing their operations. For example, the white roofs on their trucks are actually a translucent material that lets light into … Continue reading

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Tabs, Spaces, and All That

Xah Lee has a helpful post on dealing with tabs, whitespace, and indentation. Nothing in the post qualifies as advanced and most of you will be familiar with the material but I remember being confused about tabs and indentation when … Continue reading

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Schadenfreude

Live by the copyright, die by the patent.

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An Easy VimGolf in Emacs Challenge

Here’s an interesting VimGolf challenge. As they say in the challenge, it’s a simple problem but they’re looking for interesting solutions. The challenge is to turn this app.config[‘CHALLENGE_FOLDER’] = SOLUTIONS_FOLDER app.config[‘SOLUTIONS_FOLDER’] = CHALLENGE_FOLDER into this app.config[‘CHALLENGE_FOLDER’] = CHALLENGE_FOLDER app.config[‘SOLUTIONS_FOLDER’] = … Continue reading

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Cheswick on Passwords

Over at acmqueue William Cheswich has an interesting article on Rethinking Passwords. After listing the usual litany of problems with passwords as a security measure, Cheswick traces the historical roots of the problem. He says that we are stilling using … Continue reading

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Killing Sentences

Recently I’ve had several occasions where I wanted to kill to the beginning of the current sentence. No problem, I thought, I’ll just write a quick bit of Elisp like (push-mark nil nil t) (backward-sentence) (kill-region) and bind it to … Continue reading

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Seriously?

Surely this is a joke. Either that or someone has way too much time on their hands. And what about the people signing it?

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Haldar On Editors

Vivek Haldar published a list of his most popular posts of 2012 and one that I particularly liked was My Setup. In that post, I found this quote about editors exactly right. Editors This is where the religious wars usually … Continue reading

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Moving Between Emacs Windows

As I mentioned in my winner-mode post, I recently configured Emacs to start with a frame-width of 162 columns. I’ve also added a call to split-window-right in my init.el to get the two columns of windows that I prefer. This … Continue reading

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