Monthly Archives: February 2023

A Brief History of Sun Microsystems

Posted on 2023-02-08 by jcs

If you’re involved with computer/software engineering and aren’t just starting out, you’ll be familiar with Sun Microsystems. For a long time their computers seemed to many of us to be the very apotheosis of a “workstation”. Many software folks still … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Loop Macro Explained

Posted on 2023-02-07 by jcs

If you’re a Lisper, you’re probably aware of the loop macro controversy. Few people are neutral: they either love it or hate it. I’m in the latter group. Although I’ve gotten to where I can mostly read a loop macro … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Supercharge Your Workflow With Yasnippet

Posted on 2023-02-06 by jcs

I’ve long been an enthusiastic Yasnippet user and have written about it a few times. Its canonical use case is in programming to fill in primitives such as the for loop in C or a class definition in Python but … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Better Dired Listing

Posted on 2023-02-05 by jcs

Sooner or later almost every Emacs user discovers Dired and becomes a dedicated—or even fanatical—user. It’s basically a file manager but embedded within Emacs. As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to be an old-timey sort of guy so my natural … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Sussman Explains the End of SICP

Posted on 2023-02-04 by jcs

If you’ve spent any time at all on Irreal, you know that I consider Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) one of the best—arguably the best—books on computer science. It’s influence was tremendous and served as the backbone of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Literature Review With Org-ref

Posted on 2023-02-03 by jcs

If you’re a researcher or even a college student writing research papers, one of the arduous tasks waiting for you is the literature review. You probably start with a single paper and want to find related papers that address the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Code vs. Verbatim in Org Mode

Posted on 2023-02-02 by jcs

If you do even a little writing in Org mode, you’ve almost certainly needed to occasionally typeset a word or sequence of words in a typewriter font. This, at least for me, comes up in two ways: I want to … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Org Plot Made Easy

Posted on 2023-02-01 by jcs

As long term Irreal readers know, I was trained as a mathematician and later became a computer software engineer so you’d think I’d be pretty good at generating plots: Nope. I’m terrible at it. My go to tool is Gnuplot, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment