Open Office Means Less Openness

Posted on 2018-07-10 by jcs

My first draft of this post started with a righteous rant about the attempts of management to justify open offices with talk of increased communication and collaboration. It was gratifying to write but probably wouldn’t be as amusing to read. Nevertheless, I had a point. There’s no longer any excuse for that excuse: many studies have debunked it.

Now Cal Newport posts about a study that shows that open offices actually decrease collaboration and employee interaction. Some are expressing surprise but it’s really obvious when you think about it. Imagine you’re an engineer or some other type of “thought worker” working in an open office. You have to concentrate on the task at hand but there’s all this noise and disruption going on. What do you do? You put on your earphones, crank up the volume, and retreat into your private place. You’re not communicating, you’re not collaborating, you’re doing your best to block out those around you.

The study reveals that workers in an open office spend an astounding 72% less time interacting face-to-face after shifting from a conventional office configuration. In the study, face-to-face interaction dropped from 5.8 hours to 1.7 hours per day. At the same time, digital communication increased: more emails and more IMs. Revealingly, the management of the group studied reported that their own metrics for employee effectiveness had decreased too.

As Newport says, this is just one study of 52 employees but the results are so much what you’d expect that it would have been surprising if they had found otherwise.

If you’re a manager, please stop the madness. Your employees and bottom line will thank you.

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Helpful Revisited

Posted on 2018-07-09 by jcs

About a year ago, Wilfred Hughes introduced the Helpful package. The idea was to enhance the Emacs built-in help function with context and additional information. Now Hughes revisits Helpful and talks about its new features.

You can checkout Hughes’ post for the details but a couple of features are worth mentioning. He’s evolved Helpful into a sort of interface console from which you can set variables and trace or debug functions. He’s also improved the formatting and added additional useful information.

I meant to give Helpful a try when it was first introduced but I never got around to it. Hughes’ new post has encouraged me, again, to give it a go. If you use Emacs help a lot, you should definitely read Hughes’ two posts and perhaps give Helpful a spin. It’s on MELPA and MELPA stable so installation—if only on a trial basis—is easy.

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The Genesis of Grep’s Name

Posted on 2018-07-08 by jcs

Virtually everyone in our profession knows about grep and how to use it. But do you know where the name came from? If you’re old enough to remember the pre-Linux days you probably do. If you’ve never worked on a Unix (as opposed to Linux) system you may never have heard the story and even if you did, you probably didn’t have the context to understand the answer.

The excellent <computerphile> series has a great short video in which Brian Kernighan explains the genesis of the grep name. When you watch the video, you’ll see what I mean about “context.” To really understand the name you have to have at least a passing familiarity with the ed editor.

In a way, the most interesting aspect of the video—at least for the greybeard contingent—is the comments. I would have thought, before reading them, that virtually everyone in our field knew, at least generally, where the name came from. That is decidedly not the case. Many of the commenters expressed delighted surprise to find out the answer. One even admitted that he’d always assumed the ‘g’ stood for GNU. That’s not an unreasonable assumption if you grew up with Linux but grep comes from the early 1970’s (it first appeared in Version 6) so it was born and named long before the GNU project was conceived.

Everyone will enjoy the video—it’s only 10 minutes—but if you’re a younger developer and don’t know this stuff, it’s especially important to watch it. This is part of our heritage and it’s important that you help keep the knowledge of it alive.

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Org Unfolding Tip

Posted on 2018-07-07 by jcs

From Thierry Stoehr we have this excellent tip on unhiding all the data in an Org file:

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Learn a Little AWK

Posted on 2018-07-06 by jcs

It used to be that almost every programmer was proficient with AWK. When Perl came along, that became less true and now many programmers have never used—or even heard of—AWK. That’s too bad because it’s a tremendously useful tool and, in my opinion, much easier to learn and use than Perl. Although it’s possible to write reasonably complex applications in AWK it really excels in short, simple text manipulation.

Greg Grothaus (via Wilfred Hughes) has a nice post, Why you should learn just a little Awk, that demonstrates some simple AWK manipulations. His examples are very elementary and don’t begin to exercise the full power of AWK. Still, they give you the flavor and should encourage you to learn a bit more.

The definitive source is, of course, Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger’s The AWK Programming Language. If you’re serious about learning AWK, that should be your go-to source. There’s also Eric Pement’s HANDY ONE-LINERS FOR AWK and Jonathan Palardy’s four-part AWK tutorial. The latter two resources build on Grothaus’ tutorial and will likely give you everything you need to know for everything but the most serious AWK applications.

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ESC ESC ESC

Posted on 2018-07-05 by jcs

Emacs Command of the Day offers a tip that, oddly, a lot of people don’t seem to know about:

I usually use it after trying Ctrl+g and right before sending a SIGUSR2 signal.

I didn’t realize the part about closing the minibuffer but that’s probably why it often works for me.

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Apple’s New Maps

Posted on 2018-07-04 by jcs

Way back in 2012, I wrote about Apple venturing into maps and the problems they were having. As I said at the time, getting good map data is extraordinarily hard—Google at the time had over 7,000 people working on their data—and it was going to be some time before Apple could catch up with Google.

That time, it appears, has come. Tech Crunch has a fairly long article reporting that Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up. Like Google, they have built new tools and assembled a large team to gather the data needed for a world class mapping application. After 4 years work, Apple is expecting to release their new maps for the San Francisco and Bay Area with iOS 12. Other areas will roll out over the next year.

Being Apple, the company has built in privacy from the beginning. No person ever sees the unsanitized data containing license plate numbers and faces: The data is encrypted as it’s gathered and the key is held by software that scrubs the privacy violating objects from it.

The other Apple-like feature is the attention to detail. Maps in Japan show more detail at an intermediate zoom level than a corresponding map in the U.S. would because that’s what the two cultures expect. Apple even licensed the fonts used by, say, the NY subway system so the signs on the maps would look the same to users. There are other examples as well. Read the article for the details. Even if you aren’t an Apple user, the article is an interesting discussion of the technical problems Apple has had to solve in building their new maps.

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Don’t Be a Peripheral

Posted on 2018-07-03 by jcs

Here’s a little red meat for the Vim vs. Emacs crowd:

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A BBEdit Challenge

Posted on 2018-07-02 by jcs

My friend Watts tweets that he thinks BBEdit has the simplest workflow for doing a search and replace on the files of a directory that do not include some term:

I took that as a challenge, of course, and immediately started figuring out how to do it in Emacs. I have a solution that uses two (or arguably 3) simple commands to do the same thing starting from a dired buffer. So the challenge is, how would you do this in Emacs using the minimum number of {commands | keystrokes}1? If you know BBEdit (I don’t) is your solution easier/simpler than the same thing in BBEdit?

Footnotes:

1

Not counting keystrokes for the search term or regular expressions in the search and replace.

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Zamansky 50: Presentations

Posted on 2018-07-01 by jcs

Mike Zamansky is getting ready to give a presentation at a professional conference. As always, this means preparing a slide deck and Zamansky is faced with deciding how to do it.

In the past, he’s described reveal.js as his go to presentation software but he decided to look at the other options. In particular, he looked at ox-beamer and epresent as well as ox-reveal. His latest video discusses each of these and what he chose to use for his presentation.

All these solutions share the virtue that you can write your slides with Org mode and export them to ready-to-show slide decks. He starts by explaining why he doesn’t just use something like PowerPoint, Google Slides, or one of their free software siblings. Those systems, he says, force him to focus on how the slides are laid out and that gets in the way of writing coherent content. He much prefers to write in Org mode taking advantage of its editing capabilities and leave it to the exporter to make the final results look pretty.

His first attempt was to use beamer. Although he likes the way the slides look, he found beamer difficult to use. He doesn’t give very many presentations so it would be hard to remember the details of using it even if he made the initial investment in learning the system.

Epresent’s slides don’t look as nice as those from the other two systems but they have the virtue of displaying from within Emacs. It’s also very easy to navigate through the slides.

Finally, Zamansky considers reveal.js and its Emacs interface, ox-reveal. It combines a nice looking final product with a dead simple input structure. Basically, any Org file can be exported as a slide deck by the inclusion of a single statement telling ox-reveal where reveal.js is located. In the video, Zamansky just uses the epresent source file for the reveal.js example. All he needed to do was point it towards reveal.js. He also showed how it’s possible to serve the slide deck directly from GitHub. That could be handy if it’s not possible to use your own laptop for some reason or another.

The video is a bit longer than usual (20:12) so you may need to schedule some time. As always, it’s definitely worth your while to watch it.

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