Category Archives: General

Further Evidence for the Demise of Cursive

Posted on 2012-11-16 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of times about the demise of cursive handwriting. Its proponents’ arguments have pretty much been reduced to (1) it is the apotheosis of all that is good and holy in written communication and (2) if we … Continue reading →

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An Optimal .emacs File

Posted on 2012-11-14 by jcs

I recently stumbled across this old post from Nickel’s Worth on optimizing your .emacs file. It’s from 2009 so it is, in some parts, dated but it still contains a lot of good ideas. To me, the most controversial piece … Continue reading →

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Traveling Salesmen, NP, NP Complete, and NP Hard

Posted on 2012-11-13 by jcs

Ron Hilton over at Absolutely No Machete Juggling has an excellent post on the traveling salesman problem. Hilton explains that when people say the traveling salesman problem is NP Complete they are almost always wrong. Almost because there are two … Continue reading →

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Advanced Dired Tips

Posted on 2012-11-12 by jcs

Xah Lee has updated his Emacs Advanced dired Tips page. I thought I knew all this stuff but Lee has some tips I wasn’t aware of. For example, you can configure what dired does when you try to copy or … Continue reading →

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Randall Munroe on XKCD

Posted on 2012-11-10 by jcs

The MAA has a great interview with Randall Munroe on every geek’s favorite online comic. Being the Mathematical Association of America, the interview concentrates on the more mathematical of the cartoons. Munroe talks about how he comes up with the … Continue reading →

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Bookmarks

Posted on 2012-11-09 by jcs

I’ve been rewatching some of Tim Visher’s VimGolf for Emacs videos (where are you Timmy?) and one of the things that struck me the second time through was his demonstration of Emacs bookmarks. I remembered my old post on opening … Continue reading →

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Using Acme

Posted on 2012-11-08 by jcs

A while ago I wrote about Russ Cox’s Tour of the Acme Editor. Acme has a lot of great ideas. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Emacs. Where Emacs puts every conceivable functionality into the editor, Acme has … Continue reading →

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What We Need In An Editor

Posted on 2012-11-07 by jcs

Vivek Haldar has an interesting post in which he asks, essentially, what we need in an editor. He remarks that most people seem to want an editor that “looks good” and has certain performance and feature aspects that no one … Continue reading →

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Apple’s Poisonous Touch?

Posted on 2012-11-05 by jcs

As regular Irreal readers know, I mostly avoid the tech wars and especially tech wars involving Apple. I use Apple products and like them very much. I also use Linux, FreeBSD, and various other platforms so although I admit to … Continue reading →

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DOS Amplification Attacks

Posted on 2012-11-04 by jcs

Matthew Prince over at the CloudFlare Blog has a nice post on DNS Amplification DDos Attacks. He starts by explaining that DNS amplification attacks are descendants of the old Smurf Attacks. He goes on to show how they work and … Continue reading →

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