Monthly Archives: May 2016

Thought for the Day

Posted on 2016-05-31 by jcs

Kontra has a nice quote from Vernon Sanders Law: "Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." — Kontra (@counternotions) May 30, 2016

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Malabarba: Mastering Emacs Review

Posted on 2016-05-30 by jcs

A year ago, Mickey Petersen published Mastering Emacs, an excellent book for beginning and intermediate Emacs users. Oddly, although I’ve seen many tweets praising it, I haven’t seen any reviews. Happily, the prolific Artur Malabarba has remedied that. If you … Continue reading →

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You Must Use Emacs or Vi

Posted on 2016-05-29 by jcs

Back in 2012, I wrote a blog post recounting my observation that the best developers tended to use either Emacs or Vim (and back then, possibly TextMate on OS X). I speculated that that might be because excellent developers choose … Continue reading →

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Writing A Custom Emacs Package

Posted on 2016-05-28 by jcs

Al Scott is an Emacs user and JavaScript developer who’s interested in using the TDD method. He likes to use Mocha to run JavaScript scripts for testing. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do that from Emacs so Scott decided … Continue reading →

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Scientific Illiteracy (2)

Posted on 2016-05-27 by jcs

Remember a couple of years ago when I wrote despairingly of American scientific illiteracy and the fact that 1 in 4 Americans didn’t know that the earth revolves around the sun? I was pretty certain that that represented the infimum … Continue reading →

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Emacs as a (Python) IDE

Posted on 2016-05-26 by jcs

A couple of years ago, Drew Werner gave a nice talk to the New York Emacs Meetup group on An Intelligent Python IDE with Emacs, Projectile, and Jedi. I came across a reference to it today and watched the video … Continue reading →

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Quoting with Org Mode

Posted on 2016-05-25 by jcs

Grant Rettke, whom Irreal has mentioned from time to time, has a nice screencast on how he adds quotes to an Org document. Like many of us, Rettke takes notes on material he is watching or reading with Org mode. … Continue reading →

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High Entropy

Posted on 2016-05-24 by jcs

And I’m pretty sure there would be no NSA backdoor. High-rate high-entropy RNG: ask the weather service "how much snow will there be in the next 24 hours". — Nick Mathewson (@nickm_tor) January 23, 2016

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Not an Editor, Not an Operating System…

Posted on 2016-05-23 by jcs

This is where its power really comes from. Emacs isn't an editor. It's an interpreter that happens to ship with an editor program. It makes a lot more sense with this mindset. — Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) November 20, 2015

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Metadata and Privacy

Posted on 2016-05-22 by jcs

By now, I hope, no Irreal reader believes the “it’s just metadata” mantra from the nosey Parkers intent on snooping into every aspect of our lives. A recent study from Stanford quantifies the privacy-stripping power of metadata (you can read … Continue reading →

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