Monthly Archives: November 2022

Almost Monospaced Fonts

Posted on 2022-11-10 by jcs

In almost every case, proportional fonts are superior. They look better and they’re easier to read. One obvious exception is when programming but, even there, not everyone agrees. Still, most programmers are pretty firm in their preference for monospaced fonts … Continue reading →

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Nicole

Posted on 2022-11-09 by jcs

Sigh. This is November and we here is Florida were primed for some benign weather: not hot and horribly humid and certainly not any hurricanes. Nicole didn’t get the memo. Right now (Tuesday evening), Nicole is still a tropical storm … Continue reading →

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Counting Working Days

Posted on 2022-11-08 by jcs

Here’s a small problem to think about: how many working days are there in this month or, more generally, between any two dates? “Working days” means Monday through Friday minus holidays. It’s not a hard problem but think how you … Continue reading →

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An Update On The Copilot Suit

Posted on 2022-11-07 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about developers threatening a suit against Microsoft/GitHub/Copilot for copyright violations. The issue was that the AI assistant Copilot was “suggesting” code that was an exact copy of copyrighted code without attribution. That post … Continue reading →

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Mini Introduction to Elisp

Posted on 2022-11-06 by jcs

For those of you who are afraid of Lisp—and in particular Elisp—Suraj Kushwah has a short video on Elisp that posits the way to love Emacs is to learn Elisp. I can relate, sort of. I first learned Lisp and … Continue reading →

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Google and Twitter Compared

Posted on 2022-11-05 by jcs

Manu Cornet worked at Google for 14 years and recently moved to Twitter (he’s since been caught up in the great Twitter purge) and has an interesting discussion of the differences in the companies’ cultures as seen from a staff … Continue reading →

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Extracting and Displaying EXIF Information

Posted on 2022-11-04 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez continues to roll out new examples of applications for his dwim-shell-command framework. His latest offering is three functions that, given a photo: Display the EXIF information Displays the location of where the photo was taken in the minibuffer … Continue reading →

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FSM Diagrams in LaTeX

Posted on 2022-11-03 by jcs

I’ve written several times about my use and affection for finite state automata in programming. It’s amazing how often it can reduce a complex problem to a triviality. The first stage in taking advantage of this method is to draw … Continue reading →

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A Discussion of Markup Languages

Posted on 2022-11-02 by jcs

Alex Kladov has a post that discusses various markup languages and what makes a great one. He considers Markdown AsciiDoctor LaTeX reStructuredText HTML He finds them all lacking in various ways. He believes that any markup that’s tied to a … Continue reading →

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EmacsConf 2022 is Coming

Posted on 2022-11-01 by jcs

Leo Vivier announces on the Emacs subreddit that the 2022 EmacsConf is scheduled for December 3rd and 4th. The conference will be live streamed so you needn’t travel to participate. Most of us won’t be able to watch the whole … Continue reading →

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