Monthly Archives: December 2015

Sacha Chats with Our New Emacs Maintainer

Posted on 2015-12-12 by jcs

Sacha Chua has chatted with John Wiegley several times (see here, here, and here). Wiegley’s an interesting guy and all those chats are well worth watching. Recently, as Irreal readers surely know, Wiegley was named the new Emacs maintainer so … Continue reading →

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Reporters and Encryption

Posted on 2015-12-11 by jcs

Speaking of journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review gives them a good spanking for the terrible job they’re doing in covering the encryption wars. In How not to report on the encryption ‘debate’, the CJR takes reporters to task for swallowing … Continue reading →

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Getting Started with Emacs

Posted on 2015-12-10 by jcs

Over at Coding Quark, Dhavan Vaidya has a nice post on getting started with Emacs. Rather than talk about keybindings and navigation, he concentrates on the things you should do and the resources you should read to get going with … Continue reading →

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All The Respect They Deserve

Posted on 2015-12-09 by jcs

Conan illustrates why we hold journalists in such low esteem.

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Loading Emacs Faster

Posted on 2015-12-09 by jcs

Eric Cole has an interesting post on decreasing the Emacs load time. This is not something I’ve ever worried about because I tend to load it once when the machine boots and just keep it running. It makes no difference … Continue reading →

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Dired Hacks

Posted on 2015-12-08 by jcs

Fuco, the author of the excellent smartparens package, has a collection of useful additions to dired. Rather than define a comprehensive package, he broken the functionality out into separate packages so that you can install just what you need. He … Continue reading →

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Management Learns an Expensive Lesson

Posted on 2015-12-07 by jcs

Many, or perhaps most, of us have suffered through a round of layoffs and have found ourselves suddenly unemployed. Often these layoffs are handled in a clumsy and uncaring way. One common tactic is to call the victim into the … Continue reading →

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Tools to Protect You from Surveillance

Posted on 2015-12-06 by jcs

Jordan Fried sent me a link to his excellent article on 150 Tools to Protect Your from Global Surveillance. The article covers Encryption Cryptocurrency Using the Internet anonymously Securing email Securing your browser Secure communication The Cloud Guide to antivirus, … Continue reading →

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DWIM Narrowing Improvement

Posted on 2015-12-05 by jcs

A year ago I wrote about Artur Malabarba’s excellent narrow-or-widen-dwim function. Ever since I installed it, I don’t think I’ve once called one of the narrowing functions directly. Since then, Malabarba has posted some updates to his original post making … Continue reading →

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The Real Problem in the Encryption Wars

Posted on 2015-12-04 by jcs

The Washington Post has an interesting take on the on-going encryption wars. Daniel Weitzner, a former White House deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy, has an op-ed in which he lays out the usual arguments against backdoors in encryption … Continue reading →

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