Monthly Archives: July 2015

New Hydra Functionality

Posted on 2015-07-10 by jcs

I haven’t written about abo-abo’s excellent hydra package for a while but he’s continued to make significant enhancements to it. The latest is the ability to temporarily suspend a hydra and even push it onto a stack while you invoke … Continue reading →

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A Wonderful Piece of Unix History

Posted on 2015-07-09 by jcs

Unix is widely extolled as the first portable operating system but many don’t know how that came about. By the time of Version 6, Unix had been licensed to many universities but it still ran only on the PDP-11 family … Continue reading →

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Marking Up Quoted Org Strings

Posted on 2015-07-08 by jcs

Artur Malabarba has a nice tip on how to markup strings in Org mode that begin with ” or ‘. I should have implemented it for this post.

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Elisp/Emacs Examples

Posted on 2015-07-08 by jcs

Caio Rordrigues has an excellent resource for beginning/intermediate Elisp programmers that also lists some of the common Emacs customizations that many Emacs users end up making. For example, it tells you how to turn off requiring a “yes” or “no” … Continue reading →

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Draft #4

Posted on 2015-07-07 by jcs

I’ve had this post in my blog-ideas queue for some time but it’s always seemed too far afield from Irreal’s interests—being about writing and dictionaries, and stuff—to write about. Now, happily, I’ve found the perfect hook. I wrote previously about … Continue reading →

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Mastering Emacs in Emacs

Posted on 2015-07-06 by jcs

Virtually every Emacs geek knows about and has probably purchased Mickey’s Mastering Emacs. Álvaro Ramírez wanted a bit more: he wanted to be able to search it from Emacs. That turns out to be surprisingly easy. Just download the epub … Continue reading →

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Roundup of Open Plan Office Research

Posted on 2015-07-05 by jcs

Jack Schofield over at ZD Net has a nice post on the evils of open plan office layouts. That’s a favored Irreal hobbyhorse, of course, so you might think I’ve said just about everything there is to say about the … Continue reading →

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Obscure Math Curiosity of the Day

Posted on 2015-07-04 by jcs

The Fibonacci sequence: it’s everywhere.

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SBCL 1.2.13 Released

Posted on 2015-07-04 by jcs

The Steel Bank Common Lisp developers have released version 1.2.13. The release fixes 8 bugs and has a few enhancements for the Windows port and for threading. See the NEWS file for the details. The system compiled without incident as … Continue reading →

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Big Data

Posted on 2015-07-03 by jcs

Cory Doctorow has an interesting piece in The Guardian positing that in the commercial sphere, if not the world of spies, big data has run its course. I especially like this quote: The fact that the billions spent spying on … Continue reading →

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