Monthly Archives: February 2012

Yegge On Dynamic Languages

Posted on 2012-02-28 by jcs

I stumbled upon a nice talk that Steve Yegge gave at Stanford in 2008. The talk, entitled Dynamic Languages Strike Back, debunks some of the myths about the performance, optimization, and tools for dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl, … Continue reading →

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ESR: An Open Letter To Chris Dodd

Posted on 2012-02-27 by jcs

Eric Raymond has posted An Open Letter to Chris Dodd concerning Big Media’s approach to the Internet. It is, I think, an important letter and one that most hackers and Irreal readers will agree with. That’s not the same, of … Continue reading →

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Reproducible Science

Posted on 2012-02-26 by jcs

Ars Technica has an interesting article up entitled Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source. I’ve written a couple of times about reproducible research and how Emacs and Org Mode make it particularly … Continue reading →

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Multiple Editors And Markdown

Posted on 2012-02-25 by jcs

I’ve written many, many times about how much I love writing in Org mode. I write a plain text file that I can then export to HTML, LaTeX, or several other formats. I can even, theoretically, write an Org mode … Continue reading →

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Data Hogs

Posted on 2012-02-24 by jcs

For a long time the wireless carriers have been complaining about “data hogs” who suck up inordinate amounts of bandwidth by downloading movies and whatever to their mobile devices. As a result, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have instituted data throttling. … Continue reading →

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They Never Learn

Posted on 2012-02-23 by jcs

By now, most everyone has heard about the YouPorn Chat break in. John Graham-Cumming has the details. Due to very sloppy security YouPorn exposed the email addresses and passwords for many of their customers who signed up in 2008 and … Continue reading →

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Site Outage

Posted on 2012-02-21 by jcs

My hosting provider has informed me that Irreal.org will be down for maintenance from 12:01 am to 4:00 am on February 25.

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The Solution To Piracy: Cartoon Version

Posted on 2012-02-21 by jcs

A while ago I wrote a post on Paul Tassi’s Forbes article You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You. That was a great article with many cogent arguments but if it was TL;DR for you, here’s … Continue reading →

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Using Emacs

Posted on 2012-02-20 by jcs

Vincent Foley over at Occasionally sane has an interesting post entitled Why I Still Use Emacs. Foley lists the usual suspects (extensibility, Org Mode, GUI or CLI operation, excellent built-in documentation, configurability, Tramp, and all the other reasons we love … Continue reading →

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Lisp In The Debian Distribution

Posted on 2012-02-19 by jcs

This is interesting and sort of surprising. James Bromberger over at JEB’s Blog takes a look at Debian’s forthcoming Wheezy distribution and, among many other interesting facts, reports that Lisp is the 8th most popular language for developing the packages … Continue reading →

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