Monthly Archives: March 2023

Ritchie’s Thesis

Posted on 2023-03-21 by jcs

There’s a substantial body of lore associated with Dennis Ritchie and his work. One of the minor stories involves his PhD or lack of it. The most common story is that Harvard refused to award Ritchie his degree because Ritchie … Continue reading →

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On The Fly Command Repeat

Posted on 2023-03-20 by jcs

As many of you know, I spent many years as a Vi/Vim user. A bit more than 15 years ago, I moved to Emacs, mostly I think, because I was moving a lot of my coding to various Lisps and … Continue reading →

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Web Scraping With Org Mode

Posted on 2023-03-19 by jcs

Beetle_b has an interesting short post, about scraping a Web site, that outlines a technique that may be useful to some Irreal readers. The TL;DR was that he wanted to capture and print the content from a Web page that … Continue reading →

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Torstein Johansen on Dumb-jump

Posted on 2023-03-18 by jcs

Torstein Johansen has a short video on one of my favorite navigation packages. These days, everyone appears to want Emacs to offer the completion of those LongAndStupidFunction.names beloved by Javanistas and others. You can’t blame them, of course, but that … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: What Are They Expecting?

Posted on 2023-03-17 by jcs

This probably isn’t really a Red Meat Friday item—unless you’re a dentist—but it is, nevertheless, pretty funny and perfectly captures a common but annoying occurrence at the dentist’s office: any word yet on what a dentist is expecting when he … Continue reading →

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A Short Rant on Passwords

Posted on 2023-03-16 by jcs

It’s been a while since I’ve grumped about the dumb password rules you find on some sites. They have limits on password length, insist on some custom requirement concerning the number of digits, capital letters, and special characters, or, worst … Continue reading →

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Dashes

Posted on 2023-03-15 by jcs

It will not be news to Irreal partisans that we here at Irreal are enamored of em-dashes. Some say that they are seldom used but I love em-dashes and probably tend to overuse them. Back in the dark ages before … Continue reading →

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Asimov’s Three Laws and the Future

Posted on 2023-03-14 by jcs

I just came across this link to a 1965 short BBC interview of Isaac Asimov concerning his famous three laws of robotics. Those laws, as Asimov stipulates, are purposefully ambiguous to that he can use that ambiguity as a vehicle … Continue reading →

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Removing Emacs Key Bindings

Posted on 2023-03-13 by jcs

Once you’ve been sucked into the event horizon of your Emacs configuration, you’re always adding new bindings. Sometimes it’s for a homegrown function, sometimes it’s to configure a new package. If you longer needed one of those bindings, it’s trivial … Continue reading →

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Using Org Mode

Posted on 2023-03-12 by jcs

Aditya Athalye has a long(ish) and interesting post on how he uses org mode for writing and more. Like many of us, Athalye has used a lot of apps for keeping notes and publishing his blog and slides for his … Continue reading →

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