Blogging with Emacs, Jekyll, and Github

Posted on 2015-05-06 by jcs

Obviously, Irreal is published with WordPress. Some folks complain about WordPress but I’m very happy with it. It’s provides a simple and easy to maintain blogging platform that, along with org2blog, allows me to concentrate on writing rather than continually fussing with my CMS. It’s not the only solution, of course.

It’s possible to generate a static site and publish it on Github using Jekyll and Org mode. It’s a nice solution and, arguably, gives you a bit more control. Certainly, you don’t have to worry about a database and backing it up. It turns out that it’s not too difficult to set up a site in this manner.

Gopar over at pygopar.com has a handy write up on how to configure your site. It’s a step-by-step guide so it’s easy to follow and should have you up and running in no time at all. Now all you have to do is write your blog posts in Org mode and publish them to the site. Again, Gopar gives you the details.

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C: Reports of my Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Posted on 2015-05-05 by jcs

If you cruise along the technical byways of the Internet, you might conclude that the C language is dead. Hardly anyone will admit to writing in it and it’s most often dismissed as old and crufty, a dinosaur language even. It reminds me almost exactly of the way COBOL was treated a few years ago.

Christopher, over at Woohoo it’s bacon!, posts on why he thinks C is still the best programming language. Remarkably, the reasons are the same as they’ve always been: C is a small, portable language that allows close access to the bare metal. He’s got other reasons as well, so you should give his post a read if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, over at lextrait.com, Vincent has a nice chart that shows you why you might want to learn C. There’s still lots of serious work being done in C and, indeed, if it suddenly stopped working, almost every tool we use would also stop working.

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Pair Editing with Emacs

Posted on 2015-05-04 by jcs

It makes me shudder with horror but if you like the idea of pair editing, Emacs has got you covered. zk-phi has released togetherly that lets you share a buffer with one or more colleagues. It works by setting up a local server to which the other users can connect with Emacs to get a view of the buffer you want to share.

As I said, it’s definitely not for me but if it’s something you would find useful you should give it a spin. It appears to still be early in its development cycle but functional. It does not appear to be in any of the ELPA repositories yet.

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Stingray Status

Posted on 2015-05-03 by jcs

I’m sure most Irreal readers are familiar with the fake cell phone towers known colloquially as “Stingray” after the version manufactured by the Harris Corporation. Vox has a nice article on the status of the Stingray and the deteriorating government efforts to keep the use of the device secret.

As things stand now, the government is dismissing cases against dangerous defendants rather than release information about the program. That probably won’t last much longer because the details are leaking out and judges and prosecutors (not to mention defense council) who have been kept in the dark about the program are discovering its existence and scope.

The real problem for the device is that it vacuums up details on all nearby cell phones, not just those of the suspect the government is trying to capture. That’s a clear Fourth Amendment issue. Although the government swears they aren’t doing so, the device can also capture actual conversations as well as phone metadata.

The Vox article explains what the devices do and the current status of the legal arguments against them. Vox don’t mention their use outside the U.S. but I’d be surprised if they aren’t being deployed everywhere. The article is definitely worth a read. Of course, you run the risk of coming away infuriated.

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The Case Against Agile

Posted on 2015-05-02 by jcs

Back in early April, I wrote about Nic Ferrier’s take on agile. Ferrier understands it as a way of increasing communication in development teams. He makes a good case that agile is at worst benign and that in most cases it has a lot to offer.

Here’s the other side of the story. Ralf over at agileoverflow presents the above post from Michael O. Church arguing that agile is nonsense and giving a long and detailed account of its shortcomings. It’s very interesting and you should definitely read it.

As I said in my original post on Ferrier’s interview, I’ve never used agile and am completely ignorant about its benefits and shortcomings. The two posts give opposing view points and help, at least, identify some of the main issues. I still don’t know if agile is something we should embrace or not but I’d be happy to hear from readers on either side who have some wisdom on the matter.

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Org Mode HTML Themes

Posted on 2015-05-01 by jcs

Fabrice Niessen has a couple of beautiful Org mode HTML themes that lets you produce lovely and functional Web pages by exporting normal Org mode files to HTML. Currently there are two themes. The first, Bigblow, is a general theme for Org documents. It does the same sort of thing that exporting to the default theme does but has much more functionality and produces beautiful output. Niessen has a demo of the theme in action that will give you a good idea of its capabilities.

The second theme, ReadTheOrg, is a clone of the Sphinx theme used by the Read The Docs site. It’s perfect for producing HTML documentation.

Niessen has a useful refcard that explains how to use the themes with Org mode. It’s mostly the usual Org mode objects but there are a few other commands to generate special notation for things like notes and warnings.

These themes and Katherine Cox-Buday’s post on exporting to PDF show that Org mode provides a publishing platform that is much more flexible than it might appear. The default output is very nice and usable as it stands but with a little CSS or documentclass work you can produce beautiful documents that are the equal of any other documents—at least any other documents that are digitally produced.

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Memacs Paper

Posted on 2015-04-30 by jcs

I’ve mentioned Karl Voit’s Memacs project before. I’m really interested in its ideas and have been implementing various manual procedures to capture some of the same data. My end goal is to implement Memacs on my own machines but it may take some work as Memacs is implemented in Linux and some of the data gathering modules may have to be reworked to function on OS X.

If you’re interested in more information about Memacs, Voit published a very nice description of it on arXiv.org, which you can get for free. The paper goes into the rationale for Memacs, its basic architecture and then a use-case story that illustrates how it’s helpful.

It’s an interesting paper and not too long so you should give it a read if you have any interest at all in personal information management.

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A Nice Set of Emacs Tips

Posted on 2015-04-29 by jcs

Via Artur Malabarba we have a link to an excellent set of Emacs tips from Ben Maughan. Maughan has a local mailing list to which he posts an Emacs tip every week. Happily, for the rest of us, the list is available as a Web page too.

A lot of the tips are elementary but I learned a couple of things so it’s probably worth your while to cycle through them. Or you could extend the pleasure by reading one a day. Either way, the tips are short and to the point so you won’t waste any time.

I’m glad Malabarba pointed us to the list and I’m grateful to Maughan for making it available to all of us through the Web site. Now if I could only figure out a way to get on the list.

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Grep in Emacs

Posted on 2015-04-28 by jcs

Xah Lee has a useful tutorial page on grep and grep-like searches from Emacs. The page is an old one but is worth bookmarking if, like me, you keep a list of valuable Emacs reference material. For some reason, I have difficulty remembering the material covered in the tutorial so it’s really useful to me to have a quick link to it.

Lee covers how to use grep, rgrep, and lgrep from Emacs. That’s pretty straight-forward, of course, but he also shows how to get the resulting file listed in a dired buffer and how to search every marked file in dired for a regular expression and then step through the results.

It’s a short tutorial and worth taking a look at if you’re not already familiar with using grep and grep-like searches from Emacs. You may also want to bookmark it so you have it handy for a quick review.

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Some Dired Tips

Posted on 2015-04-27 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a nice post on Emacs dired tips. Dired is amazingly powerful but most of us don’t begin to take advantage of its capabilities. Mbork looks at a few things you can do to enhance your workflow with dired. Many of them I was (and you probably are) familiar with but I did learn about how to omit “uninteresting” files.

He covers several areas so you should take a look. If you learn even one thing you didn’t know, it will be time well spent.

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