Tag Archives: Tech

What wc Means by Lines

Posted on 2019-02-21 by jcs

Every Unix/Linux user (and maybe Windows users too) is familiar with the wc command that counts characters, words, and lines. It an easy way to see how large a text file is and is often useful in scripts when you … Continue reading →

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Zamansky: GitHub Classroom 2

Posted on 2019-02-18 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has another video out on how he uses GitHub Classroom for teaching. Like the first, it’s not really about Emacs—although he does use Emacs in the process, of course—but it’s an interesting study on a tools-based approach to … Continue reading →

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Securing Your iPhone

Posted on 2019-02-14 by jcs

This is an Apple-centric post but I know a lot of Irreal readers have iPhones or iPads so it’s worth passing on. Over at Computerworld, Jonny Evans has an excellent article on How to stay as private as possible on … Continue reading →

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Unix and Linux History from Maddog

Posted on 2019-02-12 by jcs

Older readers may know of Jon “Maddog” Hall. Although we hear less from him these days, he’s been a force in the open source movement for many years. I just came across a video in which he talks about Unix … Continue reading →

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Managing Dependencies

Posted on 2019-02-03 by jcs

Russ Cox has an excellent post on managing software dependencies. He begins by describing the problem: we’ve gone from talking about but not implementing code reuse to the wholesale use of packages/libraries/modules that we often don’t know much about. Most … Continue reading →

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Zamansky: Travis-CI

Posted on 2019-02-02 by jcs

Mike Zamansky has a new video up but it’s not one in his Using Emacs Series. Zamansky is doing a miniseries (probably 2 or 3 videos) on GitHub Classroom and how he uses GitHub in his teaching. His first video … Continue reading →

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Using ed

Posted on 2019-02-01 by jcs

About a year and a half ago, I wrote, somewhat disparagingly, about the idea of using the ed editor for every day work. The problem is that ed is a line editor meant for use with teletype-like devices. Because it … Continue reading →

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Glass Panel Keyboards

Posted on 2019-01-31 by jcs

This post may seem Apple-centric but it’s not. Even though it’s Apple that is patenting this idea, it’s the technology itself that I find interesting and want to discuss. According to AppleInsider, Apple has applied for a patent on replacing … Continue reading →

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Freeing Space on Your Mac Development Machine

Posted on 2019-01-27 by jcs

This post is nominally specific to Mac users but the same techniques, mutatis mutandis, could be used by developers on Linux and perhaps even Windows. It’s a commonplace today that disk space is cheap and that we can operate—to a … Continue reading →

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Test Drive Programming Fonts

Posted on 2019-01-22 by jcs

Programmers, it seems, are always looking for the perfect programming font. Years ago, I settled on Inconsolata and haven’t looked back. A lot of that is probably laziness: it can be a pain to track down fonts to see what … Continue reading →

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