Monthly Archives: February 2016

Privacy versus Law Enforcement

#AppleVsFBI pic.twitter.com/5aSx2shARm — Jayson E. Street (@jaysonstreet) February 21, 2016

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Running Emacs as a Daemon

For some workflows, especially those centered around the terminal, it makes sense to run Emacs as a server so that you can use emacsclient to quickly pop up an Emacs frame. I mostly just have a GUI instance of Emacs … Continue reading

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Iedit

Mbork has posted a sequel to his highlighting post that I wrote about before. This time he discusses iedit. Mbork says you can think of it as Hi Lock mode with the added capability of editing all the highlighted entries … Continue reading

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The Heisenberg Release Uncertainty Principle

Steve Purcell formulates a fundamental law of software engineering Heisenberg's Release Uncertainty Principle says you can accurately know what the software will do, or when you'll get it, but not both. — Steve Purcell (@sanityinc) October 13, 2015

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Why Helm

Sean Irby has posted his thoughts on why you should be using helm. Irby argues that helm not only makes navigating the Emacs UI easier but also assists in learning Emacs in much the same way that spelling correctors help … Continue reading

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Highlighting

Mbork has another nice post on some of the lessor known corners of Emacs. This time it’s about highlighting words in a buffer. There are lots of ways of doing that, of course, but they have subtle differences that make … Continue reading

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Still Think You Have Nothing to Hide?

How about sexually explicit pictures from your webcam? Would you like to keep those private? As they point out in the article, the GCHQ capturing random pictures from the webcam is eerily reminiscent of the telescreens in Orwell’s 1984. But … Continue reading

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Premature Optimization and Bugs

All developers are aware of Knuth’s warning about the dangers of premature optimization. Yesterday, I ran across two posts that nicely illustrate those dangers in the wild. The first is a tweet that explains why Unix files that begin with … Continue reading

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Open the Current Buffer’s File in Another Application

Ustun Ozgur has posted a video in which he demonstrates his package emacs-friends. The idea is that you provide the package with an association list mapping (your name for) an application to it’s executable and the code automatically generates functions … Continue reading

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The Mysteries of Perl

Those of you who have used Perl will understand this: #perl pic.twitter.com/EeWfpfY9nN — David M. Bradford (@tinypig) January 6, 2016 It turns out, though, that the joke’s on us: Haha yes Perl is ok with it. Just to up the … Continue reading

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