Org Mode 9.2.6

Posted on 2019-09-04 by jcs

Bastien tweets that he’s just released Org-mode 9.2.6:

It’s a bug release so there’s no big changes, just a bit of bolt tightening.

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Tips For Working Remotely

Posted on 2019-09-03 by jcs

The other day I blogged about The Remote Work Report and how most people, given the opportunity, love working remotely. Some work from home, while others prefer coffee shops for even remote working spaces. For those of you who spend some or all of your time working from home, Christopher Hiller has some tips on how to do so effectively.

The most important of these are to have a home office and good equipment. The home office is important not only for psychological reasons but also because it provides a place where you can shut the door and focus on the task at hand. Hiller recommends against working on, say, the couch both for focus and health reasons.

The mandate to have good equipment is pretty obvious but as Hiller says, a craftsman doesn’t try to work with inferior tools and you shouldn’t either if you want to produce good work. Some equipment that you might not think about are a good, boom-mounted microphone and earphones. You’ll need those for teleconferencing, which you’ll probably be doing a lot.

The rest of Hiller’s post focuses on good habits, things like working regular hours and being able to stop at the end of your day. Take a look at his post. Most of it’s common sense but if you’re just starting out it can be a big help.

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Remembering Unix at 50

Posted on 2019-09-02 by jcs

As hard as it seems to believe, Unix is going to be 50 this year. Once Unix escaped from the Labs and became generally known and available, there was a lot of skepticism that it would have amount to anything. You can still find and read lots of papers detailing all the problems with Unix. That continued even after it became clear that Unix was changing everything.

As a nice nice retrospective at Ars Technica points out, Unix’s influence is everywhere today. Both Android and Apple phones run on Unix derivatives and, of course, the Internet essentially runs on Unix. The article tells the story of how Unix grew out of the failed Multics effort and was, for the first part of its life, a skunkworks project that most definitely did not have the support of Bell Labs management. They didn’t even have a computer to do the work on until Ken Thompson found an unused PDP-7 in a neighboring department that he able to appropriate.

That got them going but it was very rudimentary and didn’t have any disks or even tape drives. It wasn’t until they concocted a fiction about a text processing system for the patent department that they got a decent machine to work on.

Perhaps the most fortuitous aspect of Unix was that it was developed while AT&T was still a regulated monopoly and not allowed to sell or make a profit from—among other things—computer software. That resulted in Unix being given to universities and then its escape into the wild. When AT&T was broken up, they tried to put that genie back in the bottle but it was, of course, too late and Unix came to dominate the computer operating systems space.

Take a look at the Ars Technica article. It’s tells the story of an important part of our heritage and tells it pretty much the way I have always understood it.

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Weather Alert

Posted on 2019-09-01 by jcs

Those of you in the U.S., especially the South Eastern U.S., are certainly aware of Hurricane Dorian, a very powerful Cat 5 hurricane bearing down on the Bahamas and the southern east coast. Happily, the forecast track moved to the East since the earlier advisories, which means it’s less likely to make landfall in Florida.

The latest advisories have Tampa (home of the Irreal International Headquarters) out of the probability cone so Irreal and its minions probably won’t be affected. Nonetheless, the current advisory has a 17 per cent probability of Irreal experiencing tropical storm force winds. That’s not likely to cause any Internet or power disruptions but it is, I suppose, possible. Thus, if Irreal misses a post or two during the next few days, don’t worry. I’ll post them as soon as I can.

In the mean time, if you want to follow along at home, here’s the link to the National Hurricane Center. Scroll down to the Hurricane Dorian section and click on the Warnings/Cone Static Images graphic to see the latest track and probability cone.

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Open Office Sanity Strategies

Posted on 2019-08-31 by jcs

I keep resolving to stop writing about open office spaces. Even though I’ve never suffered having to work in one, I find their use almost as infuriating as I do the government’s illegal surveillance. Sadly, the madness goes on, I keep getting incensed, and I keep writing.

There are a couple of fairly recent articles on open offices worth mentioning. The first, Everyone hates open offices. Here’s why they still exist, by Katharine Schwab takes a look at why, despite the myriad studies showing that they don’t deliver on their promised benefits and have significantly adverse effects on employee productivity, morale, and health, open offices not only aren’t going away but are becoming more common.

The reasons are well known. One is that they’re cheaper and can save large companies hundreds of millions of dollars. As much as managers love to recite their fairy tales about increased communication and productivity, it’s just cant; the main reason is saving on rent and buildout.

The other reason, although not as venal, is more depressing: the hipsters are doing it and the people in charge want to be hip too. These people think that because Google has open offices they should get them too so they’ll be cool and successful. Like Google. The idea is self-ridiculing so there’s no point on saying more about it.

The second article, How my colleagues and I stay sane in our open office, by Jonas Downey discusses some strategies for dealing with the open office environment if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in one. The first and most important rule is to strictly enforce “library rules” for the office. That means no talking, no phones, no music, and generally being quiet and respecting your colleagues’ focus.

Downey works at Basecamp, which is predominately a remote work company so mostly people are in the office only if they need to meet with someone face-to-face. That makes the open office setup less onerous, I suppose, but notice that even so the company has taken pains to reduce the stress on their employees. Obviously not cool like the hipsters.

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The Remote Work Report

Posted on 2019-08-30 by jcs

Over at FYI they have an interesting report on working remotely. The number one takeaway, I suppose, is that almost everyone loves working remotely. If you’re one of those people who do, it’s hard to see why someone wouldn’t love it. Still, some folks don’t. One of my friends and ex-colleagues had to work remotely for a few months and hated it. He felt isolated and alone and missed talking to people.

We here at Irreal are misanthropes, of course, and have no such problems. It turns out that in that respect we’re like almost everyone else. Almost every remote worker who responded to FYI’s survey (486 people) said they loved it (91%) and would recommend it to a friend (96%).

The rest of the article deals with why people love working remotely, the problems that they encounter doing so, their workspaces, and tips they’ve found helpful in dealing with the problems. The number one problem, of course, is maintaining a presence with the rest of the team. That’s pretty easy if everyone is working remotely but can be especially tricky when most or part of your team is colocated.

The benefits most mentioned were not having a commute and being able to spend more time with your family. If you live someplace like California, your commute can easily be 3 hours a day so not having to endure it is a huge benefit. And, of course, being there to see your kids off to school and welcome them home is something that shouldn’t be dismissed lightly.

The article is fairly long but is mostly sidebars and charts rather than running text so it’s easy to read. If you’re interested at all in remote work, you should definitely give it a read.

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Emacs 26.3 Released

Posted on 2019-08-29 by jcs

Nicolas Petton has announced that Emacs 26.3 has been released and is available for download. I always compile mine by hand so I have no idea if the prebuilt binaries have appeared yet but compilation—even on the Mac—is simple and fast.

I’m writing this with 26.3 and haven’t encountered any problems. Of course, the release is a bug fix mainly, I think, to squash the problem with loading GNU ELPA packages that I wrote about previously, so I’d expect it to be rock solid or at least as solid as Emacs 26.2.

As usual, thanks to Nico, John, Eli, and all the others for their hard work in bringing us another release of our favorite editor.

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Seven Bash Tips

Posted on 2019-08-28 by jcs

Carrying on with yesterday’s theme of Bash hackery, I present to you Ian Miell’s Seven God-Like Bash History Shortcuts You Will Actually Use. If you’re anything like me, you read one of these articles and think, “Wow! That’s really neat. I’m gonna start doing that too.” Of course, you immediately forget the shortcuts and keep doing things the way you always have. Even Miell, who wrote the book on this stuff, admits that he mostly forgets the shortcuts. He says, however, that these are shortcuts that he uses everyday and that he’s actually learned them.

You may or may not “actually use” Miell’s tips but they are handy and if you work on the command line a lot, they are definitely worth knowing. Many of the tips involve quickly changing one of the words on the last command or, perhaps, switching their order. That’s useful when you misenter one of the arguments in a long command line. Rather than retyping the whole thing, you can use one of the shortcuts to minimize the amount of retyping you need to do. There are other shortcuts for doing things like a search and replace. Take a look at Miell’s post to see what you can do.

Of course, you can always bring up the last command and use the editing capabilities of Readline that I wrote about yesterday to accomplish the same things so you might not think it’s worthwhile learning the shortcuts. If you strive to absolutely minimize the number of keystrokes you type, Miell’s shortcuts will put you a bit ahead but only a bit. My own reaction is “Wow! That’s really neat. I’m gonna start doing that too.” But I probably won’t.

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Emacs For a Single Line of Text

Posted on 2019-08-27 by jcs

What if you could use Emacs to edit the command line? Wouldn’t that be great? Well, of course, you can. Not only can but almost certainly do. I’m not talking about invoking Emacs from Bash with Ctrl+x Ctrl+e; I’m talking about readline.
If you have any experience at all with the Bash shell you probably know that you can move to the beginning of the command line with Ctrl+a and to the end with Ctrl+e just like in Emacs. That’s the Readline library in action. It turns out, though, that the library is much richer than just those two commands.

If you look at the Readline man page or library manual, you’ll see that it actually supports an astounding number of Emacs commands, mostly bound to the familiar key sequences. You can transpose characters or words, move or delete characters or words, mark and operate on regions, and even record keyboard macros. And just like in Emacs, you can bind your own key sequences to the commands. You can even configure it to use Vim key sequences.

If you’d like to find out more about Readline and discover some of the things it can do, Sinclair Target over at Two-Bit History has a very nice post on the things you didn’t know about GNU readline. Go read it right now. You’ll be glad you did.

I’ve been using Bash for decades and have always made use of the Ctrl+a / Ctrl+e trick and a couple of the other movements but I didn’t realize how much of the Emacs (or Vim) command set is implemented. It truly is, as Target says, Emacs for a single line of text.

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Scroll All Mode

Posted on 2019-08-26 by jcs

From Wilfred Hughes’ Emacs Command of the Day Twitter feed, we have this useful tip:

I had no idea this existed. It’s probably not something you’re going to use very often but it’s easy to imagine some use cases for it.

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