Category Archives: General

Exploratory Data Analysis with Unix

Posted on 2012-12-09 by jcs

Seth Brown over at Dr. Bunsen has a great post on how the ordinary Unix coreutils can be used for exploratory data analysis. His first example (head -5; tail -5) < data to show the first and last 5 lines … Continue reading →

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Is The TSA Finished?

Posted on 2012-12-08 by jcs

I know, I know: I’m courting a comeuppance from Betteridge’s Law but this is too good to ignore. Christopher Elliot at Linked in has an interesting post in which he posits that the TSA, as we know it today, can’t … Continue reading →

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Let’s Play Ivmgolf

Posted on 2012-12-07 by jcs

After my last VimGolf post I thought it would be fun to try another so I headed over to the VimGolf site to find a challenge. The first one I stumbled across was Let’s play some Imvgolf. The challenge is … Continue reading →

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Autocompleting

Posted on 2012-12-06 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice post on the various methods of autocompleting in Emacs (search for 2012-12-01). Most Emacs users will be familiar with the majority of the material but it’s helpful to have it all written down in one … Continue reading →

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New Emacs Movie: Dired

Posted on 2012-12-05 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim has started “season two” of his Emacs Movies. This is the second section that will describe various Emacs modes and tools such as Dired Org-mode Eshell Diary Calc Ediff Gnus Vmail Erc BBDB Info His latest movie is … Continue reading →

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More News From the Cursive Front

Posted on 2012-12-04 by jcs

Yahoo News has an interesting article on the cursive wars. Should cursive handwriting be abandoned as an anachronism or should it be preserved as an important life skill? Regular Irreal readers already know where I stand on the matter but … Continue reading →

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Icomplete Mode

Posted on 2012-12-03 by jcs

Per Xah Lee (search for 2012-11-28), I’ve experimentally turned on icomplete-mode. I’m not sure how I like it so I haven’t included it in my init.el file yet. According the internal documentation, icomplete-mode “implements a more fine-grained minibuffer completion feedback … Continue reading →

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Let’s Play VimGolf

Posted on 2012-11-30 by jcs

Or VimGolf in Emacs anyway. Over at Life seen through a coder’s eyes, Yassine Chaouche poses the following problem. Starting with an Emacs buffer containing only [[Image(grep_1.png)]] end up with [[Image(grep_1.png)]] [[Image(grep_2.png)]] [[Image(grep_3.png)]] [[Image(grep_4.png)]] [[Image(grep_5.png)]] [[Image(grep_6.png)]] [[Image(grep_7.png)]] [[Image(grep_8.png)]] Chaouche solves … Continue reading →

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A Hyper Key for the Mac

Posted on 2012-11-28 by jcs

The other day I wrote about using the Mac’s virtual keypad to get some additional key sequences for Emacs. That didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped because, unlike my MacBook Pro, the keyboard for my iMac doesn’t have … Continue reading →

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Get Rid of the TSA Before They Kill Us

Posted on 2012-11-27 by jcs

As regular readers know, we here at Irreal are not fans of the TSA. Apparently, Charles Kenny at BloombergBusinessweek isn’t a fan either. He’s posted an article entitled Airport Security Is Killing Us in which he makes the case that … Continue reading →

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