The Using Org Mode Features Posts

Posted on 2019-09-27 by jcs

My post on Wednesday about Karl Voit’s explanation of Org-mode tags and categories is actually part of a series. Voit decided to to curate his posts on how he uses Org-mode into a series he calls “Using Org Mode Features” or UOMF.

The series is, as Voit says, not meant to be a series of tutorials on how to use Org but an exposition of how he uses it to solve his problems. Sometimes, he admits, a post doesn’t even describe a solution, just a problem that he’s trying to solve.

Many of the posts are older offerings that fit into the UOMF theme. Follow the link to see a list of those posts. Voit is an expert on this subject having written his PhD thesis on Personal Information Managers. You’ll probably find that you don’t agree with all of his decisions but will nevertheless come away with several good ideas. It’s definitely worthwhile taking a look at his post to see if one of his discussions covers a topic you’re interested in.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Hacker Laws

Posted on 2019-09-26 by jcs

Here’s a quickie that I stumbled on the other day. Dave Kerr has a nice GitHub repository that’s gathered a collection of “laws” and aphorisms that all Geeks know and love. He calls it hacker-laws. Many of the laws, such as Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law, and The Peter Principal, are familiar to the population at large. Others, such as Hanlon’s Razor, are a little less known. Still others, such as the Law of Leaky Abstractions, and the Unix Philosophy are specialized for us geeks.

My favorite, though, is Cunningham’s Law. It has the virtue of being both screamingly funny and true. Cunningham’s Law says that the way to get a question answered correctly on the Internet is not to ask the question but to post the wrong answer. Once you think about it, the truth and humor of the law is obvious.

Kerr’s list contains many examples of humorous wisdom. It’s definitely worth taking a look to see if there are any that you don’t already know.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Tags and Categories in Org Mode

Posted on 2019-09-25 by jcs

Karl Voit has a very nice post on Tags versus Categories in Org-mode. I’d completely forgotten about categories, even though I’ve written about them before, so I was glad to get a refresher. Categories, for those who don’t know, are the names in the left of the agenda listing. I always thought of them as just the name of the file the item was from but that’s just the default. It turns out that that name is really the category and you can set it to anything you want.

The question that Voit considers is when to use categories versus when to use tags. There is, of course, no hard and fast rule but Voit explains what he does and why he does it. Generally, he just uses the default category but sometimes he may have several files related to a single “thing” and he uses a single category for the files so that all the items have the same name in the agenda. That’s more important than you might think because you can filter the agenda on a category so you want related items to have the same name.

Whereas each item can have only one category, it can have several tags. Voit recommends using a limited number of tags but emphasizes that that’s just what works best for him. I tend to use tags as a list of keywords to help me find an entry. Thus I might tag a journal entry containing the magic spell to compile Emacs with emacs and compile. I try not to go crazy and use more than, say, five tags per entry but I haven’t found that to be limiting.

The moral here is that there are many systems for tagging and using categories and you should choose one that best fits your workflow. Be sure to take a look at Voit’s post. It covers all the details and is very informative.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How to Keep a Lab Notebook

Posted on 2019-09-24 by jcs

I saw a pointer to this reddit post with the provocative title “Org mode appearing into the wild…” Naturally, I had to follow the link to see what it was about. It turns out to refer to a Science article entitled How to keep a lab notebook. It’s mostly advice to researchers in the laboratory sciences and comprises short descriptions from many researchers on various aspects of keeping a laboratory notebook.

Other than universal agreement that it’s a necessary part of doing research, there’s a significant amount of disagreement on the best way of doing things. A surprising number of researchers prefer keeping their notebooks on paper. Some of that is no doubt driven by long standing protocols involving the protection of intellectual property but some researchers said they just liked it better.

Many of the researchers preferred a digital notebook citing advantages such as searchability and backups. One even mentioned Org-mode as the ideal way of maintaining her lab notebook saying that Org makes it easy to include a scan of handwritten notes, equations, bibliographies, tables, and even code. That’s a sentiment that many Irreal readers will identify with even if they aren’t laboratory researchers.

Finally, some of the researchers used a hybrid system where they collected notes in a traditional paper notebook as they were performing their experiments but later either transcribed or scanned them into a digital notebook.

It may be that I’m just fascinated by such things but I found the article very informative and enjoyed reading about the various strategies that people used. It’s well worth a read if you have any interest in such things.

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Is It Time to Get Rid of The P-Test?

Posted on 2019-09-23 by jcs

Betteridge’s law tells us to answer that question with a “no” and that’s—at least partially—the right answer. “No” is the right answer because scientists and statisticians can’t agree on what should replace the p-test. It’s the wrong answer because it’s not working and an uncomfortably large part of scientific research is proving to be irreproducible, a fact that many statisticians and other scientists are attributing to an over reliance on the concept of statistical significance.

Over at Science News, Bethany Brookshire has an excellent article on what science would look like without the concept of statistical significance. Most everyone agrees that using the p-test as a binary indicator of whether or not an experiment “succeeded” is inappropriate. The problem is that they can’t decide on what to do instead. As Steven Goodman, a Stanford University medical research methodologist, puts it, Everyone knows what they’re against. Very few people know what they’re for. Some simply want to tighten the p-test criteria from .05 to .005. Others, like Aubrey Clayton, want to replace the p-test all together with Bayesian Analysis.

Statisticians seem overwhelmingly in favor of replacing the p-test as a way of deciding the worth of an experiment. Blake McShane, a statistician at Northwestern University, notes that statistics is often wrongly perceived to be a way to get rid of uncertainty but it’s really about quantifying the degree of uncertainty. Seen in that light, it’s not that the p-test is bad, it’s the notion that you can use it to eliminate uncertainty that needs to be replaced.

Take a look at Brookshire’s article. It’s interesting and provides a good summary of a serious problem.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Speaking of Passwords

Posted on 2019-09-22 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about stupid password rules and why they don’t matter for banks. Serendipitously, right after I published that post I came across an old Coding Horror post on stupid password rules. It’s a long and righteous rant on the infuriating, nonsensical password rules that confuse the less technically sophisticated leading them to seek workarounds that are less secure. At the same time, they frustrate the ideal user who employs a password manager to generate the long, random passwords that are more secure than anything the rules could provide.

Atwood doesn’t subscribe to the Irreal rule that any restriction is a sign of weakness. He divides password rules into two classes: those that you tell the users about before they attempt to choose one and those you apply as a sanity check after the a password is chosen.

There’s one rule in the first class: passwords must exceed a minimum length. What that minimum length is will vary according to the application you’re protecting and the environment you’re working in. Even if passwords are salted and hashed, a stupid password like abc is still easy to discover. A long password is effectively safe from brute forcing even with an offline attack.

The rules in the second class get rid of obvious passwords that any attacker will try. They include things like the user’s login ID, the user’s email address, and perhaps any password on one of the lists of most commonly used passwords that appear every year. You can read Atwood’s post to see the exact rules in the second class.

Of course, the only sensible thing to do is to use a password manager to generate long, random passwords. At least if the site will let you.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Troy Hunt on Bank Passwords

Posted on 2019-09-21 by jcs

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of huffing and puffing about passwords, most recently in my post on Bad Password Policies. Troy Hunt has a slightly different take on things, at least as far as banks are concerned. It seems odd that Hunt would give banks, of all institutions, a break. After all, the stakes are generally higher and banks have ridiculously lax password policies.

Hunt does agree that banks shouldn’t have these silly policies but says that they’re usually required by legacy concerns and, in any event, don’t really matter. Wait. What? How can they not matter? There’s two reasons for that. First, banks are aggressive about blocking accounts after three failed login attempts. Even if the bank has a ridiculous password policy like four digits—yes, some banks have exactly that policy—two mistakes doesn’t leave a would-be exploiter very much room.

Second, banks don’t rely just on the customer-facing security mechanisms to verify a login. They have additional mechanisms hidden from the customer. The banks, of course, rightfully won’t say what those additional mechanisms are. We’re more or less required to trust the banks that they’re effective.

Although Hunt says the policies don’t really matter, he does, as I wrote above, say that they should do better. “We’ve got old systems to interface with” shouldn’t be a perpetual excuse. After a while you have to upgrade those old systems. One of the main reasons it matters, he says, is trust. It’s pretty hard to judge the security of a site. The best method we have is, as I’m always harping, is to consider any password restrictions a sign of weak security and worse, an indication that your passwords aren’t being salted and hashed. Trust is important with any commercial interaction and especially so when dealing with banks so they shouldn’t squander it with stupid password policies.

Take a look at Hunt’s post. It’s an interesting and informative look at a little-understood aspect of banking security.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The New Luddites Take Off the Mask

Posted on 2019-09-20 by jcs

The other day I thanked the New York Times for proving my point. Now it’s The Guardian’s turn, albeit for a different point. I’m sure that by now many of you roll your eyes and think, Reagan like, “there he goes again” every time I write about the New Luddites. A sane person would have a hard time believing such people actually exist and that Irreal isn’t just indulging itself with a long-running gag.

That’s what you’d think but you’d be wrong. These people must assuredly exist and in case you think I’m exaggerating I offer this nifty little opinion piece by Ben Tarnoff appearing in the Guardian. In it, Tarnoff declares that we must “decomputerize” and explicitly urges a new Luddism to accomplish that.

His reasons for that are the usual but he gets a bit confused. He keeps conflating surveillance and computers. To be sure computers make surveillance easier just as cars make it easier for criminals to escape after a robbery1, yet no one—at least no one serious—suggests that we go back to the horse and buggy. It apparently never occurred to him that you can have surveillance without computers and computers without surveillance. If the problem is surveillance—and it is a problem—then fight the surveillance not one of the tools used by the snoopers.

Of course, when Tarnoff isn’t confusing computers with surveillance, he’s carrying on about all the power those computers use. But as I mentioned in my post on saving the world with smartphones, electricity use has been flat (at least in the US) for the last decade. As with smartphones, the New Luddites like to go on and on about how much power some piece of technology uses but they never consider how much power its use saves. It’s not hard to think of ways that using computers saves resources (teleconferencing is an obvious example) but you have to be willing to look.

I do wish these people would repair to their farms and live off the land or whatever it is they want to do and leave the rest of us in peace. But no, they have to drag us all along. I, for one, am not interested in outdoor toilets, dirty water and typhus, 19th century medicine, famines, or a life expectancy of 50 so I’m going to remain in the modern world. With my computers.

Footnotes:

1

Indeed, cars were once decried by a judge for making it easier for criminals to escape crime scenes.

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Four Org-mode Talks

Posted on 2019-09-19 by jcs

The SF Emacs Meetup group has a video of one of their recent meetings featuring talks by four Org-mode users. The middle two talks, Tikhon Elvis on reveal.js and Jeff Tull on Org Babel, are elementary overviews. They’ll be useful for those unfamiliar with the two packages but probably won’t help users who already know them.

The other two talks, John Wiegley on how he uses Org-mode, and John Kitchin on how he and his group use Org-mode to publish scientific papers, will appeal to more experienced Org-mode users.

Wiegley’s talk is really about his workflow but that workflow is Org-mode-centric so he concentrates on how he uses Org-mode to manage his life. One the big takeaways from his talk is that he doesn’t spend a lot of time in the actual Org files. Rather, he depends on the Org agenda—along with some custom views—to track his days and keep on top of things. It’s a really interesting talk and best of all, his configuration is available in his GitHub repository. One trick I learned was using a UUID as the ID property as the target for links. That’s useful if, as I often do, you want to edit the header for the link (the default target). If I make a typo or otherwise want to change one of my headers, I can’t without changing every reference. Using the ID as a target instead solves that problem neatly.

Kitchin’s talk takes us through the process he uses for writing and submitting papers to scientific journals using Org mode. Irreal has covered part of that process before, especially the really excellent org-ref package but not the actual process of preparing an article for a specific journal. The journals are notoriously crabby about the exact format you have to use when submitting papers and its more than just a house style sheet. Kitchin covers how he and his group have automated most of these annoying details. He’s the expert on this stuff because, as he says, his group have published about 30 papers using Org-mode, which is more than anyone else in the world.

The videos are a little over an hour and 45 minutes so you’ll have to schedule time but they are definitely worthwhile.

UPDATE [2019-09-19 Thu 14:27]: Fixed link to video.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Emacs Workout

Posted on 2019-09-18 by jcs

Tony Ballantyne is an Emacs-using Science Fiction writer whom I’ve written about before. Ballantyne has an interesting device to help him remember Emacs commands: the Emacs workout. The idea is to write short summaries of Emacs features that you find useful but don’t invoke every day. That way, you can periodically go through the list to build up your Emacs muscles. Used correctly, the technique is an example of spaced repetition, which many claim to be the most efficient way of learning something. See this excellent video by Ali Abdaal for more on the idea.

You can find Ballantyne’s list at the link. It’s worth reading to pick up some new ideas as well as remind you of old ones. For instance, I didn’t know about map-query-replace-regexp. I don’t have a need for it in my workflow right now but it’s nice to know about it for the day that one pops up.

Ballantyne’s list is a useful place to start but to really take advantage of the idea, you should make your own covering the seldom needed but useful Emacs techniques that you can never remember. That way you can review them periodically and keep them fresh in your mind and muscle memory. There are all kinds of useful shortcuts that I learn but forget because I don’t need them often. I even have functions that I’ve written in my init.el that I’ve either forgotten or only vaguely remember. You can, of course, look these things up once you know they exist but that’s a serious context switch. I’m going to try Ballantyne’s method to see if I can better keep them in mind.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment