Monthly Archives: May 2015

NSA Metadata Collection Ruled Illegal

Posted on 2015-05-09 by jcs

The Second U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that the NSA’s mass metadata collection is illegal. That’s great news, of course, but the ruling is narrower than we’d like. The Court ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which … Continue reading →

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Ztree

Posted on 2015-05-08 by jcs

Alexey Veretennikov (fourier) has a nice project on Github. Ztree is a set of two Emacs utilities that deal with directories in a tree-based way. The first, ztree-dir provides a tree representation of a directory. Branches can be opened to … Continue reading →

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Org Bullets

Posted on 2015-05-07 by jcs

I’m pretty happy with the default bullets in Org-mode but you don’t have to settle. abo-abo points us to this package by Sabof that uses some nice UTF-8 symbols for the bullets. The package README has a screen shot of … Continue reading →

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Blogging with Emacs, Jekyll, and Github

Posted on 2015-05-06 by jcs

Obviously, Irreal is published with WordPress. Some folks complain about WordPress but I’m very happy with it. It’s provides a simple and easy to maintain blogging platform that, along with org2blog, allows me to concentrate on writing rather than continually … Continue reading →

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C: Reports of my Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Posted on 2015-05-05 by jcs

If you cruise along the technical byways of the Internet, you might conclude that the C language is dead. Hardly anyone will admit to writing in it and it’s most often dismissed as old and crufty, a dinosaur language even. … Continue reading →

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Pair Editing with Emacs

Posted on 2015-05-04 by jcs

It makes me shudder with horror but if you like the idea of pair editing, Emacs has got you covered. zk-phi has released togetherly that lets you share a buffer with one or more colleagues. It works by setting up … Continue reading →

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Stingray Status

Posted on 2015-05-03 by jcs

I’m sure most Irreal readers are familiar with the fake cell phone towers known colloquially as “Stingray” after the version manufactured by the Harris Corporation. Vox has a nice article on the status of the Stingray and the deteriorating government … Continue reading →

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The Case Against Agile

Posted on 2015-05-02 by jcs

Back in early April, I wrote about Nic Ferrier’s take on agile. Ferrier understands it as a way of increasing communication in development teams. He makes a good case that agile is at worst benign and that in most cases … Continue reading →

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Org Mode HTML Themes

Posted on 2015-05-01 by jcs

Fabrice Niessen has a couple of beautiful Org mode HTML themes that lets you produce lovely and functional Web pages by exporting normal Org mode files to HTML. Currently there are two themes. The first, Bigblow, is a general theme … Continue reading →

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