Managers Want An End To Work From Home

Posted on 2022-04-13 by jcs

It’s no secret that many middle managers recognize the existential risk that working from home represents to their jobs. It’s no surprise, therefore, that they are doing everything they can to put an end to it.

According to an article in Fortune, managers are fed up with work from home and 77% say they will fire or reduce the pay of those who refuse to return to work. That’s a tough position but it may be those managers are whistling past the graveyard. According to a second Fortune article, offices are obsolete and so are the managers who insist employees must return.

Keith Ferrazi and Kian Gohar say that just as companies have come to realize that they can’t dictate how, where, or when then their customers choose to interact with them, they must also realize that the same is true with their employees. They dismiss the notion that work from home is an aberration due to COVID-19 and say that managers are in denial if they believe it will go away once the pandemic ends.

The authors say companies that have had less than satisfactory results from work from home are due to their trying to overlay the digital way of working on the old, analog protocols. Worker, as evidenced by the Great Resignation, are not willing to put up with the old ways of doing things any longer.

Right now, employees are in a position to insist on their demands but as the first article points out, that won’t be the case forever. Sooner or later it will be an employers’ market and job seekers won’t have as much leverage. One hopes that by that time, companies will have adapted to the new realities.

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Curved Quotes in *HELP* and *MESSAGES* Buffers

Posted on 2022-04-12 by jcs

Since Emacs 25, single and double quote in the *HELP* and *MESSAGES* buffers are transliterated to their curved equivalents. This is usually, but not always, what you want. It turns out you can control whether or not the transliteration takes place but it’s not obvious how to do it.

Over at A Scripter’s Notes there’s a post that describes how to control the transliteration of quotes. It’s not too hard but it is a little fiddly. You won’t have to worry about this unless you’re writing functions or apps that other people are going to be using and then, truth to tell, only if you have a perfectionist approach to the presentation of your text output.

Sadly, I do have that approach so I’m glad to know how to deal with the issue. If you’re like me, take a look at the post.

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A Research Work Flow in Emacs and Org-mode

Posted on 2022-04-11 by jcs

Sam Wallace has an interesting post on how he takes research notes. He’s a Mathematics PhD student so he reads lots of papers that he has to take notes on as well as class notes and his own research projects. The post is an explanation of how he leverages Emacs and Org-mode to organize his notes and workflow.

He mainly uses Org-mode, reinforced with CDLaTeX, to take his notes. His approach was inspired by Gilles Castel’s post, My Mathematics PhD research workflow, which is similar but uses Vim instead of Emacs to tie everything together. I’ve written about Castel and his astounding Mathematics note taking procedures before.

The interesting thing about Wallace’s workflow is that although he uses some external tools and packages, such as Zotero, Org-noter, and ivy-bibtex, it mainly rests on Org-mode. Org is an excellent way of organizing notes and research no matter what field you’re in but Org’s built-in LaTeX support augmented by CDLaTeX for efficient entry makes it particularly well suited for Mathematics.

If you’re a PhD student or researcher, you really should take a look at Wallace’s and Castel’s posts. They’ve both got a lot of good ideas on how to get organized.

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What’s New In Emacs 28

Posted on 2022-04-10 by jcs

As usual upon a major Emacs release, Mickey Petersen, of Mastering Emacs fame, has an exhaustive listing of what’s new in the release. His post is an annotated version of the NEWS file so it is very long and detailed. It’s much too long to cover in detail here so you should take a look at the post itself.

The big news, of course, is that native compilation is now an official feature of Emacs. That change should speed up almost everything you do in Emacs because it compiles Elisp into native code. You need to specify --with-native-compilation when you run configure prior to compiling Emacs.

Besides native compilation, there are many many smaller changes. One—that isn’t mentioned in the NEWS file—is that they fixed the interaction with macOS Monterey that made Magit interaction run slowly on Macs. It’s a huge relief to me to have that fixed.

Among other interesting changes are the inclusion of the Ctrl+x x keymap that includes functions for buffer actions such as revert-buffer-quick, rename-buffer, clone-buffer, and others. Sadly, it appears that the Bookmark+ package grabs the Ctrl+x x prefix so that’s something that I need to resolve.

I also like the new binding Meta+s Meta+. that starts an isearch for the thing at point.

As I said, there are a huge number of new and changed features. Any given user will find many of them interesting and many of them of no interest at all. A quick reading of Mickey’s post is a good way to discover which changes are interesting to you so that you can investigate them in more detail.

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A Linux User Moves to Windows

Posted on 2022-04-09 by jcs

I used to be a (fiery) Windows hater. I’d tell anyone who’d listen what a terrible OS it was and how using it was the sure sign of a luser. I’m no longer that way. It’s not that I’ve become a convert, it’s just that I’ve stopped thinking about it at all. It’s been easily 20 years since I’ve had to deal with or even be on a Windows machine.

Of course, some intelligent and reasonable folks find themselves forced by circumstances to use Windows. One such person is Duncan Lock, who after using Linux for 15 years, took a new job and found himself in a Windows shop.

He writes about his experience of moving from Linux to Windows and in the same way that it’s hard to look away from a traffic accident, I found myself reading it. I expected that he was going to tell me that Windows had improved and become an OS that a developer could embrace. I needn’t have worried. Not much, it appears, has changed in the last 20 years.

The terminal and shell—even Powershell—are still terrible and basically unusable. Package management is nonexistent. Customization is essentially impossible. There’s much more—Lock has a whole list of inadequacies that you can read about if you’re interested in such things.

I’m not interested. Not even to gloat. For me the value of Lock’s post is that it means I can go back to sleep and not think about Windows for another 20 years. Perhaps by then things will have improved. But probably not.

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Red Meat Friday: As I’ve Said Before

Posted on 2022-04-08 by jcs

Most smart people know that you shouldn’t pay any attention to polls you see on Twitter. Those of us who aren’t as smart can’t help ourselves. Here’s a case in point:

Anyone with an ounce of sense would chuckle and move on. After all, there’s so much that’s just plain silly about it. But, as I mentioned, some of us can’t help ourselves.

As I’ve said before, serious engineers mostly use Emacs or Vim. That opinion always incites blowback but I think it’s more true than not. One thing for sure, not many serious engineers are claiming Kate or Atom are the best editors. Sure, they’re probably okay but no one serious is going to waste time on them.

As longtime readers know, I’m very laissez faire about what editors folks choose to use. Whatever works for you is fine with me but please don’t put up a list of “the best editors” and fail to mention Vi(m) and Emacs. If you do that, you are not serious.

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The ACM Backfile

Posted on 2022-04-07 by jcs

Here’s some good news: the ACM has opened the first 50 years of its backfile. That’s all the articles between 1951 and 2000. That may be even better than it seems because recent papers are more apt to be available on the author(s)’ Website. It’s the old papers that can be hard to find.

Having access to those papers can be very useful for practitioners. For many years, I’ve maintained an ACM Digital Library subscription an found it worthwhile. It’s about $100 over the cost of an ACM membership so may be out of the price range for some. Opening the first 50 years goes a long way towards making these valuable papers available to all.

Kudos to the ACM for taking this step.

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Lab Leak: The Video

Posted on 2022-04-06 by jcs

Ryan Grim from The Hill has a video out that does a good job in summarizing the Vanity Fair article on the origin of COVID-19 that I wrote about a few days ago. In just over 10 minutes Grim does an excellent job in explaining what the Vanity Fair article said and what it all means.

Judging from the comments, Grim is a long time lab leak skeptic but he now says that the theory of COVID-19 coming from a lab leak is not merely a plausible explanation but, by far, the most likely one. He also argues, persuasively I think, that of course the Wuhan lab would want to do the (gain of function) research. They had every incentive to do so.

If you want to understand what the current arguments are concerning the pandemic’s origin, the video is an excellent and easy way to find out with an investment of only 10 minutes. The takeaway is what it’s always been: these people have been lying from the beginning in an effort to protect the virology community and its research programs. The danger is that they won’t have learned their lesson and will continue doing dangerous gain of function research until they manage to kill us all.

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Org Modern

Posted on 2022-04-05 by jcs

As regular readers know, I’m not much for bling and fancy formatting in my editor but that’s a personal choice without a moral dimension. Plenty of people like to have their Emacs buffers look as nice as possible.

For those people, Daniel Mendler has a nice package called org-modern that uses font manipulations to make an Org buffer look almost typeset. If you follow the link, you’ll see a GIF that switches between normal Org mode and Org-Modern mode.

It certainly does look nice so if you like this sort of thing, you might want to try it out.

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Emacs 28.1

Posted on 2022-04-04 by jcs

Yesterday, Eli bumped the version of Emacs to 28.1. I wasn’t sure if there would be further release candidates coming but at the time the release had not appeared on any of the FTP servers nor had there been a release notice posted to emacs-dev so even though I wrote a post I was hesitant to publish before I knew what the status of the release was.

Today, the official announcement was posted to eval-devel and the tarballs are available in the usual places so Emacs 28 is finally with us. As usual, we all owe Eli and the other maintainers who contribute their time and skills to ensuring that Emacs is a living, up-to-date piece of software.

My project for this evening is the compile and install the new release. With any luck, tomorrow’s post will be brought to you by Emacs 28.

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