Monthly Archives: May 2021

The Apple Ecosystem

Posted on 2021-05-31 by jcs

Anyone who’s been around Irreal for any length of time knows that I’m an Apple user. I like the build quality of their hardware and macOS/iOS are generally good enough. But the thing that really makes it all work for … Continue reading →

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Markup Languages Compared

Posted on 2021-05-30 by jcs

There are several popular light weight markup languages for producing printed or displayed typeset output. I use “light weight” to distinguish them from heavy duty markup languages such as TeX, LaTeX, or Troff. One thing they all have in common … Continue reading →

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Corruption in Academic Computer Science

Posted on 2021-05-29 by jcs

According to a shocking Viewpoint article in the Communications of the ACM, there’s corruption in the computer science community. I know, I know: film at eleven. But this corruption involves cheating by academic computer scientists. Cheating is never okay, of … Continue reading →

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How The Package System Works

Posted on 2021-05-28 by jcs

Jiacai Liu over at Keep Coding has an interesting post on the Emacs package system. The post is nominally about maintaining your Emacs configuration but is actually a quick overview on how the package system works. The problems that he’s … Continue reading →

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Washington State Sues a Patent Troll

Posted on 2021-05-27 by jcs

As you all know, Irreal doesn’t think very highly of patent trolls. Of course, nobody (except patent trolls) thinks very highly of them. Some organisms that might be characterized as parasitical actually enjoy a symbiotic relationship with their hosts. Patent … Continue reading →

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Google Channels Lucy

Posted on 2021-05-26 by jcs

Almost every fall during its 50 year lifetime, the Peanuts comic strip would run a variation of the Lucy and Charlie Brown football gag. The basis of the gag is that every year Lucy would talk Charlie Brown into trying … Continue reading →

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Magit 3.0 Released

Posted on 2021-05-25 by jcs

Jonas Bernoulli has just released Magit 3.0. It doesn’t appear to have reached MELPA yet but will doubtless appear shortly. The new release contains over 1,200 commits and comes two and a half years after the last feature release. Bernoulli’s … Continue reading →

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Sudo

Posted on 2021-05-24 by jcs

Anyone who works in a Unix or Linux environment is familiar with the sudo command. Sudo allows the user to execute a command as root. That’s sometimes necessary even for the most basic users who aren’t operating on a locked … Continue reading →

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Mechanical Keyboards

Posted on 2021-05-23 by jcs

I’m a huge fan of mechanical keyboards. Back in the old days that meant the IBM Model M and its latter day incarnation from Unicomp. I’ve had both—although I foolishly left my Model M behind at my last job—and there’s … Continue reading →

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Two Tramp Tricks

Posted on 2021-05-22 by jcs

Over at TAONAW JTR has a nice post on a couple of tramp tricks. They’re pretty simple and don’t require any heavy duty configuration or setup. The first is to set dired-dwim-target to t. The variable is a bit more … Continue reading →

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