Tag Archives: Tech

Matt Rickard has a—at least to me—provocative post on RSS. As I’ve said many times, I’m a big believer in and user of RSS. Google did its best to kill it off but it turned out to be too useful … Continue reading →

One of our sacred notions—never to be questioned—is the importance of writing good commit messages. There are hundreds of articles on how to write good messages and how to properly format them. Magit will even enforce a length limit on … Continue reading →

Most Irreal readers probably don’t have much need to typeset mathematics but occasionally the need does arise and if you’re like me, you want it to look as good as possible. Most of us will never be as good as … Continue reading →

Every programmer knows about the flow. They know about it even if they don’t know the word “flow”. Sadly, most other people are not familiar with the concept. Especially members of the management class. This cartoon captures the idea perfectly. … Continue reading →

I did a poor job of making my intended point in Irreal’s Quadratic Equations Reconsidered post. The intended point was that Loh had discovered a method of solving quadratic equations without having to remember—or, heaven forefend, rederive—the quadratic formula or … Continue reading →

All of us remember quadratic equations, probably not fondly. If the need arises to solve one in our professional lives, our usual solution is to use the quadratic equation, which we may or may not have memorized through having had … Continue reading →

One thing that we programmers tend to obsess about is our code font. They’re mostly the same, of course, but there are a few characteristics that matter to individual programmers and there’s also the general appearance of the font. For … Continue reading →

These days, my main hammer is Emacs and most tasks can be made to look like nails. Throughout my career, though, one of my go to tools was awk. It’s perfect for processing text files with its implied do loop … Continue reading →

Here’s a little quiz to test your regex-fu. Suppose you want to match any of the strings ab,cd ab-cd ab.cd Someone proposes the regex ab[,-.]cd but you object that that’s incorrect because the – will be treated as specifying the … Continue reading →