Monthly Archives: September 2011

Emacs As A Lisp Machine

Posted on 2011-09-30 by jcs

Xah Lee has an update to his Emacs and Unicode Tips page that I’ve written about before on my old blog. This is a great reference that tells you how to deal with Unicode and UTF-8 in Emacs. One of … Continue reading →

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Power Update

Posted on 2011-09-29 by jcs

Two weeks ago I wrote about power management in electronic devices. The thrust of that post was that because battery technology hasn’t advanced very much it was necessary to work on the problem at the other end by making our … Continue reading →

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Google Contacts And Emacs

Posted on 2011-09-28 by jcs

As a dweller in the Apple ecosystem (or walled garden if you prefer) I enjoy a shared and automatically synced contacts list across my Macs, iPhone and iPad. Therefore I don’t bother with Google contacts. Many people do, though, and … Continue reading →

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Scheme Versus Common Lisp

Posted on 2011-09-27 by jcs

A lot has been written about Scheme versus Common Lisp and the subject has achieved holy war status much like that of the Emacs versus Vi crusades. I use and am happy with both. I like that Scheme is a … Continue reading →

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First Emacs 24 Pretest Is Available

Posted on 2011-09-26 by jcs

Chong Yidong is reporting that Emacs 24.0.90, the first Emacs 24 pretest, is available for download at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-24.0.90.tar.gz. As usual, the changes are listed in etc/NEWS. In the comments to my post about Emacs 24 features, several of the commenters … Continue reading →

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SICP For The Kindle And iPad

Posted on 2011-09-25 by jcs

Long time readers know that I am a big fan of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and that I consider it the best book ever written about computer programming. I have the on-line version permanently bookmarked … Continue reading →

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More On The Demise Of Handwriting

Posted on 2011-09-24 by jcs

Earlier this month I wrote a post speculating on the end of handwriting. By “handwriting” I mean cursive handwriting. Although I’ve pretty much stopped using a pen or pencil entirely most people are still at least printing things by hand. … Continue reading →

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Xah’s Emacs Quiz

Posted on 2011-09-23 by jcs

Xah Lee has another Emacs challenge. This time, it’s to replace entries of the form <tr><td>pound</td><td>&#163;</td><td>pound sign, U+00A3</td></tr> with entries like this: <tr><td>pound</td>£<td>pound sign, U+00A3</td></tr> This is, presumably, a small tweaking of Lee’s very useful page on HTML/XML Entities that … Continue reading →

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Setting The Goal Column In Emacs

Posted on 2011-09-22 by jcs

As you move vertically from line-to-line, Emacs tries to keep the point in the same column position or as near to it as it can. Normally, that’s what you want to have happen but sometimes it’s convenient to have the … Continue reading →

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An Application Of Benford’s Law

Posted on 2011-09-21 by jcs

Benford’s Law is a surprising result that says data from many sources have the leading digit distributed in a non-uniform way. For example, the first digit is 1 30% of the time but 9 less than 5% of the time. … Continue reading →

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