Monthly Archives: August 2015

Emacs as an OS

Posted on 2015-08-14 by jcs

Daniele Sluijters says: People make fun of #emacs calling it an OS, but why do you call #Xcode that's actually bigger than #osx an IDE? — Daniele Sluijters (@daenney) August 3, 2015 He has a point but I don’t think … Continue reading →

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Mickey on Flycheck

Posted on 2015-08-13 by jcs

If you’re a Flymake user, Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has some advice for you: switch to Flycheck. It’s a drop in replacement for Flymake that has better out-of-the-box language support and is faster. Mickey says that for him the … Continue reading →

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Diffing Regions in the Same File

Posted on 2015-08-12 by jcs

A Nice tip from Aaron Fischr: #emacs hint of the day: Compare two regions in a single file with M-x ediff-regions-wordwise — Aaron Fischr (@fu86) July 31, 2015 This works for relatively small regions. For larger regions (over 200 lines, … Continue reading →

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Oracle on Finding Exploits

Posted on 2015-08-12 by jcs

Via Matt Blaze: My first assumption after reading this was that Oracle's web server was hacked and this article is a parody. https://t.co/ODpT4L76TE — matt blaze (@mattblaze) August 11, 2015 Oracle’s Mary Ann Davidson wrote an astoundingly foolish and arrogant … Continue reading →

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Yasnippets Tutorial

Posted on 2015-08-11 by jcs

Lefteris Karapetsas has an interesting tutorial on using yasnippets for entering boilerplate code. A lot of us use small snippets for minor tasks such as filling in a for or while loop. Karapetsas shows how to use it for large … Continue reading →

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The Origin of STDERR

Posted on 2015-08-10 by jcs

Most (all?) modern operating systems have the notion of STDERR, a separate output channel that programs can use to output error messages. It’s especially important for Operating Systems that have some notion of “pipe” where the output of one program … Continue reading →

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XML Parsing

Posted on 2015-08-09 by jcs

Always use the best tool available. (via Karl Voit) OH Q: What's your favorite XML parsing tool? A: rm - @tmarble — About Programming (@abt_programming) July 22, 2015

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Installing Org 8.3

Posted on 2015-08-09 by jcs

Org 8.3 is ready on Elpa so those of you installing it with the package manager can upgrade at your convenience. When I upgraded and reloaded Org I got the error message Invalid function: org-babel-header-args-safe-fn After some experimentation, I gave … Continue reading →

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CNN on Encryption Policy

Posted on 2015-08-08 by jcs

The CNN Website has a deeply dishonest Op Ed by Mike Rogers on Encryption. Rogers is the former Congressman who served as the head of the Select Committee on Intelligence. You may remember him as the apologist for the NSA’s … Continue reading →

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Diff a Buffer with its On-Disk File

Posted on 2015-08-07 by jcs

Ben Maughan over at Pragmatic Emacs has a handy tip that I didn’t know about. Sometimes it’s convenient to see the differences between the current buffer and the underlying on-disk file. Emacs, of course, has you covered. Just call ediff-current-file … Continue reading →

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