Monthly Archives: August 2022

Unicode in AWK

Posted on 2022-08-21 by jcs

A few days ago I wrote about the excellent video of David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan discussing AWK and its history. In the video, Kernighan mentions that he’s been working on enabling Unicode in the One True AWK. Here’s a … Continue reading →

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Shouting at Disks

Posted on 2022-08-20 by jcs

Recently, I wrote about a Janet Jackson song that could cause laptops to crash. That turned out to involve frequencies from the song that resonated with a critical frequency in the disk subsystem and was solved simply by installing a … Continue reading →

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Emacs and the Unix Philosophy

Posted on 2022-08-19 by jcs

Ramin Honary has a six part series of posts that presses the claim that Emacs does, in fact, adhere to the Unix Philosophy that a program should do one thing and do it well. Almost everyone else’s opinion is that … Continue reading →

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Janet Jackson and Crashing Laptops

Posted on 2022-08-18 by jcs

Raymond Chen occasionally posts interesting stories from his (long) time at Microsoft. His latest offering tells the story of how Janet Jackson used to have the power to crash laptops. It turned out that playing Jackson’s Rhythm Nation on certain … Continue reading →

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Brailsford & Kernighan on AWK

Posted on 2022-08-17 by jcs

Computerphile has a another wonderful discussion between David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan. We are quickly reaching the time when all the original Unix people will be gone (Kernighan is 79 or 80) so these chats are our last chance to … Continue reading →

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Keeping Data and Code in the Same File

Posted on 2022-08-16 by jcs

John D. Cook has another post in his series on coding in Org-mode. The latest emphasizes how you can keep data, code, and documentation in a single (Org) file. There’s nothing new in that idea for most Irreal readers, of … Continue reading →

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More dwim-shell-command

Posted on 2022-08-15 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez continues his roll with yet another function for his dwim-shell-command framework. This time, it’s a function to combine several .png files into a single .pdf file. As with the other functions, the point is not to enable new … Continue reading →

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Tenacity!

Posted on 2022-08-14 by jcs

Apropos of nothing, this story really appealed to me. I admire cranky guys like Chaturvedi who just resist being pushed around no matter how small the stakes are. The story doesn’t make clear his motivation but I’d guess it’s less … Continue reading →

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Fundamental Laws

Posted on 2022-08-13 by jcs

For some reason there was a recent pointer to this 6 year post by Matthew Jones on some of the fundamental laws of software development. Most of them will be familiar to Irreal readers but it’s nice to see them … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Emacs Sucks

Posted on 2022-08-12 by jcs

As you can tell from the title, this is the rawest of red meat. The title comes from a post on reddit by BlackberryPerfect938 entitled Why Emacs Sucks. On the one hand, what else is new? Plenty of people try … Continue reading →

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