Monthly Archives: May 2014

Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth

Posted on 2014-05-31 by jcs

Over at Informit they’ve got a great Q&A with Donald Knuth. Twenty luminaries in computer science ask Knuth questions about himself, his work, and computer science. The questions are much more interesting than the usual session of this sort so … Continue reading →

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org-ref

Posted on 2014-05-30 by jcs

I’ve written previously about John Kitchin and how he uses Emacs and Org mode for reproducible research. Kitchen is a researcher in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University so he writes a lot of technical papers and he uses Org … Continue reading →

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Calculating My Average Post Size

Posted on 2014-05-29 by jcs

Most of my posts are pretty short: maybe 250 words or so. The other day, I began to wonder how long the average post is so I wrote a few lines of Elisp code and just executed it in the … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.0

Posted on 2014-05-28 by jcs

SBCL 1.2.0 has just been released. The big improvement in this release is support for ARM under Linux. As usual, it compiled and passed the test suite without problems on my OS X systems. As I say every month, if … Continue reading →

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Xah Lee on Docstring Markup

Posted on 2014-05-27 by jcs

If you write Emacs functions—even for yourself—you are, of course, including a docstring. Functions have a way of escaping from your init.el and finding their way to someone else’s config. Even if that doesn’t happen you may find yourself happy … Continue reading →

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Night of the Scum Spammer

Posted on 2014-05-26 by jcs

Irreal is undergoing a sustained spam attack again. This is despite the nucaptcha, which is still working. Either the spammers have defeated it or they’re paying a bunch of people a penny a piece to fill them in. In either … Continue reading →

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Geek Porn

Posted on 2014-05-25 by jcs

If you’re a geek you gotta love this whether or not you’re a Formula 1 fan. I’ve written about Formula 1 racing before so this is two more times than I expected to have anything to say about it. It’s … Continue reading →

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The Effectiveness of Dynamic Typing

Posted on 2014-05-24 by jcs

As I wrote the other day, there has been, of late, an ongoing, vigorous debate on the virtues of dynamic versus static typing. There are a lot of muscular declarations from both sides but not a lot of evidence. Now … Continue reading →

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Navigating with ace-jump-mode

Posted on 2014-05-23 by jcs

This is by way of an obvious Emacs tip. While I was in my emacs.el adding ace-windows, I decided to fix a problem with ace-jump-mode as well. When I first installed it I used【Ctrl+x Space】as the triggering key sequence. Somewhere … Continue reading →

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Some Notes On ace-window

Posted on 2014-05-22 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about ace-window, a really nice way of quickly jumping from one window to another. I used the suggested key sequence 【Meta+p】 to trigger it so it seemed pretty fast. After using it for a while, … Continue reading →

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