Monthly Archives: August 2019

Apple Gets Serious About Web Tracking

Posted on 2019-08-21 by jcs

In some very welcome news, Apple has announced that it will be implementing and enforcing a new anti-tracking policy in Safari. The new WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy lays out what types of tracking they will attempt to prevent and states … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Problem Revisited

Posted on 2019-08-20 by jcs

Saturday, I wrote about Slava Akhmechet’s The Nature of Lisp, which discussed why Lisp is such a powerful language. A day or two afterwards, I serendipitously came across a tweet pointing to Steve Yegge’s old post, The Emacs Problem. That’s … Continue reading →

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The Truth About PowerPoint

Posted on 2019-08-19 by jcs

But then we already knew that.

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Using Directory Local Variables

Posted on 2019-08-18 by jcs

I’ve written before about directory local variables (1, 2) and how they can be useful for setting variables or actions with a directory-wide scope. Over at the Emacs reddit, fearbedragons has a nice tip that leverages them to slightly reduce … Continue reading →

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The Nature of Lisp

Posted on 2019-08-17 by jcs

The other day I ran across a pointer to Slava Akhmechet’s post The Nature of Lisp from back in 2006. It’s an old post, obviously, but is worth reading because it does a very nice job of explaining what’s so … Continue reading →

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The Beat Goes On

Posted on 2019-08-16 by jcs

The last time I wrote about the open access movement, I reported that the University of California had refused to renew its Elsevier subscriptions and that the next logical step was for individual researchers to refuse to publish in Elsevier … Continue reading →

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Six Useful Git Tips

Posted on 2019-08-15 by jcs

I feel pretty safe saying that the version control wars are over and that Git has won. To be sure, there’s Subversion and a couple of other distributed version control systems whose names nobody can recall but mostly it’s Git. … Continue reading →

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ELPA Failing to Load Packages

Posted on 2019-08-14 by jcs

I always update my Emacs packages on Sunday. I’ve found that upgrading once a week is more than enough and helps limit the ever-increasing entropy here at Irreal. This past Sunday, I noticed that there was a new Org-mode in … Continue reading →

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The DMV and NULL: A Cautionary Tale

Posted on 2019-08-13 by jcs

The other day, I came across an amusing story on the KNRS Website. It involved an IT worker named Droogie who thought it would be fun to prank the DMV by buying the vanity license plate “NULL”. It was, he … Continue reading →

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The Never Googlers

Posted on 2019-08-12 by jcs

Resistance to Google and its spying may be going mainstream. Well, at least people outside of tech are talking about it and taking action. For some time, a small group of noisy people have been shouting about Google’s relentless spying … Continue reading →

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