Yesterday, I saw James Clapper on TV. That reminded me of this. It’s been over 3 years and Clapper still hasn’t been charged or even fired. If you’re an American, ask yourself what would happen to you if you lied under oath to Congress1.
It’s no wonder more and more people are convinced that the system is corrupt and that high officials live by different rules from the rest of us.
Hint: You wouldn’t be walking around free after 3 years.
Today is the 5th birthday of Irreal.org. The blog, in its Blogger incarnation, is a couple of years older but 5 years ago today Irreal opened for business at http://irreal.org/blog as a WordPress blog.
Things haven’t worked out quite as I planned—it was originally supposed to be about Lisp and SICP—but just like in real life, things adapt and change. I hope you’ve had as much fun reading Irreal as I have in writing it.
John Louis Del Rosario offers another nice example of blogging with Org Mode. What makes Rosario’s solution unique is that he doesn’t use Jekyll, Nikola, or any other blogging engine. Rather, he serves static pages to his hosting provider via Dropbox.
The blog is organized as an Org mode project so that the publishing is completely automated. He even auto-generates his index page so that he doesn’t have to worry about adding links to new posts. The result is a simple blog but one that requires nothing but a hosting provider.
As Rosario says, he can make things fancier by adding a bit of CSS and adding to his custom site-map function but that can be done as he finds the time and inclination. In the mean time, he has a working site with minimal resources. If you’re looking for a very simple way of blogging that still allows you to customize things as you like, take a look at Rosario’s post.
Mitch Fincher has posted an excellent summary of Emacs lisp. If you’re vaguely familiar with Lisp-like languages but don’t know the particulars of Elisp this page will help you get up to speed. If you’re already familiar with Elisp, you might enjoy reading through the page to discover new functions or capabilities.
I just came across a tweet pointing to an old post by Urpo Lankinen about using Emacs for writing prose. I’m always interested in that topic so I followed the link and read the post. It seemed vaguely familiar—especially with its emphasis on the (then) new visual-line-mode functionality—so I searched Irreal and found that I’d written about it 5 years ago.
When I wrote about it the first time, I was mostly concerned with the importance that he gave to visual-line-mode. Reading it now, I am struck by how he leveraged Org mode to organize his writing. This was back in 2011 so Org was nowhere near as capable as it is now. He has a follow on post that he wrote after using Emacs/Org to write his 2011 NaNoWriMo entry. That post recounts his experience with using Emacs/Org on a long project.
It’s interesting to see how many of the things he complains about are fixed now. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to search his blog so I’m not sure if he’s posted further, more recent thoughts on writing with Emacs. If you use Emacs for writing straight prose, as opposed to code, you will probably enjoy his posts.
Remember how I told you and told you and told you and told you and told you about the Iron Law of Data Collection? That no matter what the government says or promises, data, once collected, will find other uses and will, inevitably, eventually be abused. Remember how the U.S. Government promised that their bulk data collection was for fighting terrorism only and would never be released to other agencies or used for other purposes?
The government’s data collection is no exception to the iron law, of course, and in a FISA ruling from 2015 recently unsealed, the government admits that terrorism data is being used for routine law enforcement purposes. FISA, demonstrating its contortionist proclivities, managed to twist itself into believing that this was somehow compatible with the fourth amendment. It isn’t, of course, but nothing must be allowed to interfere with the iron law.
This abuse is justified under §702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which is scheduled to expire in 2017. When it comes up for renewal, you can be sure that the government will paint dark pictures of our future if they are precluded from collected this data. When they do, remember two things:
It won’t be long before some divorce lawyer—using the government’s own arguments—will insist that because the data is there and already used for routine purposes, his client should be allowed access to his or her spouse’s email and texts.
I’ve written before about using Jekyll as a blogging engine (1, 2). It’s a nice solution but it’s not the only one. Mike Zamansky was using Jekyll but didn’t like that he had to maintain a Ruby development environment on all his machines. He doesn’t use Ruby except for blogging with Jekyll so he started looking for another solution.
Since he’s a Python programmer, Nikola seemed like a good choice. He says it’s more complicated than Jekyll but also more powerful. Being a Python programmer, he felt comfortable with the additional complexity. Zamansky is also an Org mode user and wrote his Jekyll posts with it. In this post, he describes how he leverages Org to blog with Nikola.
That turns out to be easier than it was with Jekyll. Head on over to his site to get the details. If you don’t want the trouble of dealing with a CMS like WordPress, his solution may meet your needs.
If you’re running a Linux system and sometimes experience an X crash, Sacha has some advice on how to keep Emacs running. Emacs is notoriously slow to start, of course, and that alone is reason enough to be annoyed when an X crash causes it to quit. Even more annoying is losing data. Sacha was having this problem so of course she set out to solve it.
Her method rests on starting Emacs in daemon mode. That keeps things running even if X quits. By starting Emacs at boot time, all she has to do is connect to the Emacs server with
emacsclient -c
when she logs into X. After that, everything is just like before but Emacs keeps running even if X dies.
There’s a couple of gotchas so be sure to read Sacha’s post for the details. She also discusses how to get Emacs to start at boot time, which isn’t as trivial as one might hope.
Recently, I came across this reddit post on which-key. I think Sacha mentioned it in one of her weekly Emacs News posts too. The post reminded me that Kaushal Modi had recommended that I try it out after I’d mentioned that I was using guide-key for the same thing.
I finally got around to installing it from Melpa and giving it a spin. Right now I’m using the default install without any customization. The first thing you notice is that you don’t have to specify which keys to pop up help for; it gives you a prompt for any key sequence if you don’t finish typing it within a second.
The second thing you notice is that the display is nicer looking than guide-key‘s. If things like that matter to you, you should take a look at screen shots from which-key‘s GitHub page. Notice that you can configure both the placement and the font faces of the pop up.
I was happy with guide-key but I also like which-key and will probably leave it installed. It seems a bit snappier than guide-key but that might just be a matter of the idle delay time. If you aren’t using either, I encourage you to try them out.They’re perfect for bindings like 【Ctrl+x r】 which have lots of seldom used completions.
I know about the French guillemets but being from North America I had no idea how varied punctuation marks are. Here’s an interesting summary of European quotation marks.
Quotation marks in Europe map pic.twitter.com/xLmmajFHql
— Andrey Sitnik (@andreysitnik) February 25, 2016