Monthly Archives: April 2019

How Uber Debugged a Latency Problem

Posted on 2019-04-20 by jcs

Even though I’m an Uber user, I’ve never thought very much about their IT infrastructure other than to form an (hilariously) simplified mental model of what it probably looks like. It turns out to be a pretty sophisticated operation that … Continue reading →

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Emacs Future History

Posted on 2019-04-19 by jcs

I was reading this post on some Ivy hacks and it reminded me of another post that I’ve been meaning to comment on. Over at the CollBox blog, Cameron Desautels writes about the Emacs concept of future history. The idea … Continue reading →

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Refactoring Prose With Org Mode

Posted on 2019-04-18 by jcs

Edmund Jorgensen over at Edmund’s technical ramblings has a really excellent post on leveraging Org mode in a nontrivial way for writing prose. Jorgensen is a software developer by day and a novelist by night. He’s published two novels and … Continue reading →

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EmacsCast: The Video

Posted on 2019-04-17 by jcs

Rakhim Davletkaliyev, whose EmacsCast podcast I’ve written about many times, has published a video on his Emacs configuration and workflow. As you know by now, I always enjoy seeing how others use Emacs and most often learn something new or … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Is Closing Its Ebook Store

Posted on 2019-04-16 by jcs

Microsoft is closing its ebook store. Who cares? The people who have bought books from them care because they will no longer be able to read their books. Microsoft, to its credit is offering to refund the purchase price but … Continue reading →

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RSS vs. Twitter

Posted on 2019-04-15 by jcs

Over at Gizmodo, Patrick Howell O’Neill belabors—what seems to me to be—the obvious. He posits that RSS is a much better way to keep up on what’s going on than Twitter. Wen I read that, my immediate reaction was, “Well, … Continue reading →

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Mu/mu4e 1.2 Available

Posted on 2019-04-14 by jcs

If you’re a mu/mu4e user, there’s good news. Version 1.2 has been released. It’s mainly a bug release but there are a handful of new features, which you can read about here. I’ve been using it for the last few … Continue reading →

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Emacs 26.2 Has Been Released

Posted on 2019-04-13 by jcs

It’s official. Emacs version 26.2 is out and available at the usual places. I compiled and installed it on my Macs without any problems using the usual spell: configure –with-ns CFLAGS=”-g3 -O2 -I /usr/local/include/libxml2″ make make install make install-info sudo … Continue reading →

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The Recentering Sequence

Posted on 2019-04-12 by jcs

Maybe the Emacs developers knew what they were talking about after all. A couple of years I discovered that you can control the sequence of positions to which recenter-top-bottom will move the current line. As I wrote at the time, … Continue reading →

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Some Pithy Advice to Engineers About Crypto

Posted on 2019-04-11 by jcs

Via Karl Voit we have this Tweet from Tim Dierks offering some pithy but good advice to engineers about crypto: I’ve been working on Google’s cryptography policy (for engineers). It fits in a tweet: Don’t invent your own algorithms, don’t … Continue reading →

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