Monthly Archives: January 2013

Mickey’s VimGolf 4

Posted on 2013-01-21 by jcs

Mickey’s getting into VimGolf mode with another solution to a VimGolf Challenge. I was looking at this same challenge for a possible post but Mickey beat me too it and with a very nice strategy. The challenge is to take … Continue reading →

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Why People Pirate

Posted on 2013-01-20 by jcs

Back in the beginning of January, I wrote about iiNet walking out of talks with Hollywood. The talks were Hollywood’s effort to strong arm Australian ISPs into spying on their customers to help “combat piracy.” The most compelling point that … Continue reading →

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Ebooks and PDF

Posted on 2013-01-19 by jcs

I’ve written before about the deplorable production values in ebooks: misspellings, poor typography, missing words, terrible spacing, and a general lack of cohesiveness in the finished product. The problem is particularly acute with technical books as Tim Evans-Ariyeh points out … Continue reading →

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Sorting Rectangles

Posted on 2013-01-18 by jcs

Mickey has a nice solution to the last VimGolf in Emacs challenge. It certainly doesn’t win on total keystrokes but it does demonstrate a really powerful method for solving problems like the challenge. Mickey uses sort-regexp-fields to sort parts of … Continue reading →

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Emacs Ahhhhh! Moments

Posted on 2013-01-17 by jcs

Over at the reddit Emacs subreddit Tribaal asks for advice on learning Emacs and, in particular, solicits “ahhhhh! moments” from Emacs veterans. The ensuing discussion is quite interesting and, at least at the time I read it, free of trolls … Continue reading →

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Plain Text Offenders

Posted on 2013-01-16 by jcs

A year ago, I wrote about Plain Text Offenders a website dedicated to naming and shaming Web sites that store their user’s passwords in plain text. Sadly, the Website has recently celebrated their 1000th post. Think about that for a … Continue reading →

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The Universal Argument

Posted on 2013-01-15 by jcs

Over at Wisdom and Wonder, Grant tells us how to move forward several spaces in the minibuffer. That’s just 【Ctrl+u 1 0 0 Ctrl+f】, of course but Fuco (who wowed us by doing the last VimGolf in Emacs challenge in … Continue reading →

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Emacs and Reprogrammability

Posted on 2013-01-14 by jcs

A recurring theme here at Irreal is the notion of Emacs as a Lisp Machine (see here and here, for example) and the advantages that this point of view provides. Now Martin Fowler explores this idea a little more with … Continue reading →

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The Greatest Innovation

Posted on 2013-01-13 by jcs

Chris Dixon asks “What would be the greatest technological leap you’d have to explain to someone who time traveled from the 1950’s?” It’s hard to argue with his answer. It surely has changed everything.

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UPS and the Traveling Salesman

Posted on 2013-01-12 by jcs

If you know anything at all about United Parcel Service you know that they put a lot of effort into optimizing their operations. For example, the white roofs on their trucks are actually a translucent material that lets light into … Continue reading →

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