Devin Chalmers has some words of wisdom for startups:
"Your password contains invalid characters." No, your startup contains incompetent engineers.
— Devin Chalmers (@qwzybug) December 15, 2014
Nick Selby already told them but apparently they didn’t listen.
Remember Karl Voit from the Sacha Chua chat that I wrote about previously? Voit collects data on just about every aspect of his life and stores it in an Org file. If you haven’t watched the chat yet, be sure to take a look. You’ll be amazed.
The other half of collecting all that data is being able to search it. Voit has lots of homegrown tools for that but he also makes use of the built-in Org tools:
Advanced searching in #Orgmode http://t.co/etyXQEvx1u is *very* important to know for users of #Emacs. #PIM
— n0v0id (@n0v0id) February 6, 2015
His tweet points to this excellent Worg tutorial that describes how to extract data from Org files. The methods are surprisingly flexible, and although the syntax can be daunting they’re well worth learning if you collect any data at all into Org files. It’s worth reading through the tutorial if only to see what’s available. You can always check back for the exact details when yo need them.
Voit is an expert on data collection and retrieval and it’s worth studying his methods and software. You’ll be a lot more proficient with data if you do.
occur a Bit Smarter Abo-abo is still blogging up a storm and giving us a daily dose of great Elisp. Someone looking to amass a first rate Emacs configuration could do worse than simply grab abo-abo’s daily posts and integrate them into their .emacs file.
One very nice offering is this bit of Elisp that makes occur a little bit smarter. His code arranges to make any active region the default regular expression for occur unless there’s no region, in which case the symbol at point is used.
He says that these two cases hit about 95% of his invocations of occur. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I’d guess most of us would have a similar success rate. At any rate, it’s a nice optimization and just a few lines so head on over and take a look. I’m definitely going to integrate it into my configuration.
Most of you have probably figured out that I’m a workflow geek. I love reading about people’s workflow and how they optimize their daily tasks. Popular Mechanics has a great article on The New York Times workflow. Many people in many different jobs collaborate, often under rigorous time constraints, to get each day’s paper into the hands of its readers.
The article starts out at 1:35 AM at the Times printing plant. Just getting the rolls of newsprint loaded for use by the presses is a major undertaking. They have a control room that the director of plant operations describes as an indoor traffic control tower. The facility is so large that the crew uses adult size tricycles and golf carts to get around.
The story moves on to 6:20 AM when one of the editors opens her eyes and starts checking on what happened overnight. The story continues through the day covering editorial meetings, dropping by the NYT R&D lab (yes really) and finally ends with the paper route couriers picking up and assembling the papers before delivering them to readers.
It’s a machine with a huge number of moving parts. Not all of those parts are covered with glory but every one is a necessary cog needed to get the readers’ daily papers to their doorsteps. Most people don’t think about what it takes to deliver their everyday amenities so articles like this serve to remind us that even quotidian articles can require a complicated and sophisticated operation for their production.
If you like knowing how things work, you’ll enjoy this article. It’s a look at something most of us don’t often think about.
I’m so ashamed:
Oh, wow. I had over 200 buffers open in #Emacs (15 day uptime). Didn't even notice. Buffer navigation w/ IBuffer / ido-switch-buffer rocks.
— Gergely Nagy (@algernoone) February 6, 2015
Even though my uptime is measured in months, I get twitchy as soon as I have twenty or more open. I’ve got to train myself to be a little less obsessive-compulsive.
John Cook, who’ve I’ve mentioned a few times here, has a nice Twitter feed called TeX Tips. Every weekday, he posts a TeX/LaTex tip. Mostly they’re things you’ve probably seen—although some surprised me—but they’re of great value to folks like me who use TeX but not everyday. Even LaTeX has lots of commands that are easy to forget—how do you typeset the Å character, for example—so having a daily reminder of them is useful.
Sometimes he links to a longer post by himself or someone else that covers some useful piece of TeX/LaTeX advice. For example, one post covers the draftwatermark package that allows you to put a watermark, typically DRAFT, on a document. I was wondering how to do that just the other day so it was a good find.
If you use TeX or LaTeX occasionally, Cook’s feed is an excellent and painless way to help you remember the details. It’s one post every week day so you won’t be overwhelmed.
The Stasi is a good point. The Stasi is what happens when a state tries to achieve total watchfullness.
— Nic Ferrier (@nicferrier) January 18, 2015
If you’re looking for a static-page blogging engine that you can post to from Emacs, you should take a look at Calum MacRae’s post on blogging with org-page. MacRae writes about his setup in detail so that you can set up your own blog relatively easily. His setup uses Ansible, which you may or may not want to implement.
I like the idea of static web pages but I’m not sure I like how org-page displays things. Basically, it reproduces the Org-mode buffer complete with much of the (deemphasized) markup. My source files look similar to MacRae’s but WordPress (or rather org2blog/wp) generates a display that could have been typeset with the default WordPress editor or even LaTex. I like what org2blog/wp does much better but take a look at MacRae’s post and see what you think.
A lot of bloggers I respect that I know are Emacs users are not posting from Emacs. I really don’t understand that. There are lots of blog solutions available that allow you to post directly from Emacs. Why would you not want to do this?
Regular readers know that one of my New Year’s resolutions is to learn more LaTeX. I’ve been having a lot of fun learning and using AUCTeX to write LaTeX documents. I created a tex directory to hold my .tex files and the resulting PDFs. The problem with TeX is that it’s pretty noisy as far as creating intermediate files is concerned and those files mostly stick around. But, hey, this is Emacs so I thought, “I’ll just write some quick Elisp to clean things up.”
I hadn’t gotten around to that when I decided to scroll through some of abo-abo’s old posts to see if I’d missed anything. Good thing I did because it turns out that there’s already a way clean up garbage from directories. Here’s what to do:
That’s all there is to it. Exactly what constitutes garbage is determined by the dired-garbage-files-regexp variable. It defaults to
"\\(?:\\.\\(?:aux\\|bak\\|dvi\\|log\\|orig\\|rej\\|toc\\)\\)\\'"
but you can customize it to include other types of temporary files you deal with. You can check out abo-abo’s post for one example of this. If you’re a neat-freak about your file system, this is good way to keep things spic and span.
UPDATE: See the comment by David McWilliams on how to do this from AUCTeX (for TeX detritus, of course). Very Handy.
I’m using dired+ so I don’t know if this works in plain dired but you really should enable dired+. It’s much more powerful.
Bozhidar Batsov over at the excellent Emacs Redux has a very nice post on how to clear comint buffers. Comint is the machinery behind Eshell, and Shell mode. It is a general-purpose mode for communicating with interactive subprocesses and is thus behind many of the REPL systems such as Lisp and Ruby.
Oddly, comint has no way of clearing the buffer, something I’ve often wanted when working with Eshell. Bozhidar shows us how to do that with just a few lines of Elisp. If you use any of the comint-based mechanisms, you should take a look. It will make your life just a bit easier.