Rob Syme offers up a tip about editing org-mode table formulas that everyone should know but many don’t:
TIL you can use C-c ' to edit #emacs #orgmode table formulae in a more spacious buffer. It will also highlight cells http://t.co/Zy579Izt7j
— Rob Syme (@robsyme) September 29, 2014
SQLite, a C library that implements an SQL database engine, is the most widely deployed database engine in the world. The system is extraordinarily stable. One of the reasons is that although SQLite contains about 89.9 KSLOC it has 91493.0 KSLOC of test code and scripts. Follow the last link to see what’s involved in that testing. One hundred percent coverage and regression tests are only part of it. If every project did as well, we’d have a lot less buggy software. It reminds me of Walter Bright (of Zorland C/C++ and D programming languages fame) who once wrote that over the years he has accumulated a set of regression tests for his code generator that tests every error he has ever found.
As Magnar Sveen said in Episode 4 of Emacs Rocks!, it’s all about sharpening the knife. The SQLite developers know a thing or two about knife sharpening. The latest version of SQLite (3.8.7) is 50% faster than version 3.7.17 due to micro-optimizations. They say that each optimization may contribute as little as 0.05% improvement but over the hundreds of such optimations they’ve achieved a spectacular improvement. Read the article to get an idea of what they did. Really, they’re an inspiration to us all.
I probably shouldn’t but I love this sort of thing and find many of the entries hilarious.
Over at the Google G+ Emacs community Alison Chaiken points us to an interesting post by Akkana Peck. Many times, I’ve set a key sequence for some function—often the recommended key sequence—only to have some other module steal it out from under me. This happened twice with ace-jump-mode for instance.
Peck finally got tired of that and figured out how to set a global key binding once and for all. It involves creating a minor mode and setting some alists. Head on over to Peck’s site for the details. If this sort of thing has been bothering you, take a look at Peck’s post.
Meanwhile, back at the Emacs Community, Detlev Zundel comments on Chaiken’s post pointing us toward another, more general, solution by John Wiegley. It’s also worth looking at if you have this problem.
Recently, The Washington Post published an editorial suggesting that Apple, Google, and other smart phone manufacturers provide a golden key to allow law enforcement access to locked phones. “Golden Key,” of course, is just a euphemism for a backdoor. It’s unlikely that any Irreal reader will fail to understand the implications of that but here’s some ammunition for talking to Aunt Millie.
Chris Coyne has an excellent post that details the problem with this proposal. As he says, increasingly our phones store our digital lives and in the near future will be a transcript of our lives, even our non-digital lives. Coyne’s major point is that once there’s a backdoor, others will find and use it. That could be foreign powers, rogue government agents, or criminals.
Corey Doctorow makes the same point in The Guardian and says that we can be sure that corrupt public officials will sell us out just as they have before:
“The same forces that led to bent cops selling out the public’s personal information to Glen Mulcaire and the tabloid press will cause those cops’ successors to sell out access to the world’s computer systems, too, only the numbers of people who are interested in these keys to the (United) Kingdom will be much larger, and they’ll have more money, and they’ll be able to do more damage.”
This is the same point I made in a recent post: law enforcement will always abuse any surveillance power they’re given. The only way to protect ourselves is to not give them those powers.
Law enforcement, of course, claims that if they can’t break into our phones they will no longer be able to investigate pedophiles, kidnappers, terrorists, and drug dealers. Bruce Schneier puts the lie to that nonsense. He recounts several instances where law enforcement has made these claims and were later found to be lying and notes that of the 3,576 warrants issued for communication intercepts in 2013, exactly one involved kidnapping. He also notes that far from “going dark,” this is the golden age of surveillance for law enforcement. Schneier’s post has lots of links to more background material and you should definitely read it.
Ahh, now I get it
"A burrito? What's that? Sorry, I'm new to Mexican food."
"Well, it's a bit complicated, but to start with, a burrito is like a monad…"
— Fiora☄anreteA (@FioraAeterna) September 6, 2014
The release candidate for Emacs 24.4 will appear on Friday. If all goes well, the official release will be on the subsequent Monday.
Bozhidar Batsov reports that after the release of Emacs 24.4, we will move to Emacs 25.
The upcoming #Emacs 24.4 will be the last of the 24.x series http://t.co/TbfVUVmZ0z
Looking forward to Emacs 25!
— Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) October 10, 2014
Actually, in the future the point releases will be reserved for bug fixes and all major releases will get a major version bump.
The Verge has a splendid article on the King of click: the story of the greatest keyboard ever made. That, of course, is the IBM Model M. I’ve written before about how much I love this keyboard. Even Xah Lee, who won’t use any keyboard that’s not ergonomic, has nice things to say about it. His article on the Model M has an animated gif that shows the buckling spring mechanism in action.
I used to have an actual Model M but foolishly left it at a previous employer when I left. That doesn’t matter too much because Unicomp acquired the rights to the Model M and is still selling them.
It turns out that there is still a vigorous market for the original Model M. Brandon Ermita rescues old Model Ms, restores them and resells them at ClickyKeyboards so if you have a hankering for one, it’s still possible. As one gamer said,
Those bastards are the ORIGINAL gaming keyboards. No matter how much you abuse it, you’ll die before it does
The Verge article has a nice history of the Model M and the keyboards that came before and after it. If you’re looking for a keyboard, I can’t recommend the Model M enough. Why not get the best? Unicomp has them for $79.
Jessica Kerr makes a good point.
Context is everything. If you doubt this, try using someone else's emacs.
— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) September 30, 2014
If you have a heavily customized Emacs configuration, using someone else’s Emacs could feel like using a completely different editor.