A handy tip from Wilfred Hughes
Emacs tip of the day: M-: evaluates elisp snippets, but C-u M-: inserts the result into the current buffer. Really handy for quick scripts.
— Wilfred Hughes (@_wilfredh) May 26, 2015
It’s easy to forget about the additional functionality you get by adding a prefix.
If you’re like me you’re probably often bemused by law enforcement’s almost comical misunderstanding of computers and software. As entertaining as it can be, it can also lead to tragedy. A recent example is the prosecutorial abuse in the Aaron Swartz case.
Over at Boing Boing, they have an absolutely hilarious, if frightening, article about the FBI’s panic over computer games in the early days of the home computer revolution. People were investigated and questioned, equipment and game scripts were seized, companies were put out of business because the FBI was worried that these games were passing on forbidden knowledge of computer hacking to the masses. Obviously something had to be done.
It’s funny at this remove but the same attitudes are prevalent today. Consider the life without parole sentence given to Ross Ulbricht for the crime of running a dark-web drug trading site. However you feel about drug use and those who enable it, this seems excessive. I’d be willing to bet that absent the computer involvement, Ulbricht would have received a much less severe sentence.
Bruce Schneier talks sense on the TSA and airport security. After recent reports that the TSA missed 96% of Red Team attempts to smuggle simulated guns and bombs through the check points many are asking why we even have a TSA. As one Israeli wag1 quipped about the TSA, “This is not an airline security system, this is a system for bothering people.”
Last year, Americans spent seven billion dollars on the TSA, apparently for little benefit. We didn’t get improved security, just increased inconvenience and annoyance. Schneier has some thoughts on why, despite the TSA’s dismal performance, we haven’t seen any successful attacks since 9/11 and how we can better use that $7 billion to make flying and other routine activities safer.
A former head of security for El Al.
I just stumbled across a nice Salon article on the history of BSD Unix. The article is from 2000 but still very interesting and relevant. Although it examines many of the key players in project, especially Bill Joy, the theme of the article is how BSD Unix and Joy essentially created the open source software movement.
Originally, the software wasn’t open the way it is today although Joy apparently wasn’t too assiduous in making sure recipients had the proper AT&T license. His and the project’s real contribution to open source was in pioneering a development process. A small core team acted as gatekeepers for contributions from many individual developers. Everyone was eligible to play although the filtering was strict and most contributions were not accepted. It worked pretty much the way present day big projects work. Linux, of course, has a core team of one and the organization is a bit different but you can see its genesis in the BSD project.
If you’re a Unix fan or interested in computing history, you will find this article interesting and worth reading. It’s a part of our heritage that every serious developer should be aware of. I really enjoyed it.
Colin Weir nicely captures the absurdity of the editor wars:
@marcoarment We also argue which 1970s text editor is best to use in a 1990s emulator of a 1980s terminal
— Colin Weir (@radiocolin) May 18, 2015
Howard Abrams has a nifty bit of Elisp that allows you to filter on file tags in eshell. As an example of his idea, suppose I want to list all my blog posts with a tag of “Emacs”. I can use the eshell filtering mechanism with Abrams’ custom code to write
ls ~/org/blog/*.org(T'Emacs')
This will list only those files that have a #+TAGS: line with Emacs as one of the tags.
Abrams has added the code to his EShell Tutorial. I’ve written about that tutorial before but this addition is new. If, like me, you use eshell and work a lot with Org files, you’re apt to find this very useful.
to Maryam Mirzakhani for winning the Fields Medal, generally considered the highest honor that a mathematician can receive. The fact that Mirzakhani is the first woman to win it makes the award even sweeter.
mbork has a nice post on message-mode. The mode is meant to support email message editing. As mbork explains, there are several functions that make manipulating a message buffer easier. He’s using it with mu4e but notes that it’s handy with any mail client or even related applications. I especially like the quotation blocking function.
I really need to get mu4e working on my machine, at least for my irreal.org domain. Every time I start working on it, I get stuck trying to figure out how to get IMAP working with it. I know about offlineimap. Are there any other good solutions? This is for OS X.
Aaron Bieber, an engineer from Wayfair, gave a great talk to the Boston Vim Meetup on his journey from Vim to Emacs. Bieber was a serious Vim user who had about 15 years experience with it. During that time he’d written and rewritten his configuration many times, built the popular plug-in Quicktask, and taught classes in Vim. He was, in short, no dilettante.
After establishing his bona fides as a Vim user, he talks about his reasons for exploring Emacs and subsequent decision to move to it. Although Vim can be a magical editor and is very fast, there are some things it just can’t do easily. When Bieber saw how well Org mode solved the same problems he was addressing with Quicktask, he decided to take a closer look. He also discovered that code navigation was better with Emacs, which was important to him because he works with a very large code base.
What made all this possible for him was Evil mode. He says that it’s an excellent Vim emulation and he felt comfortable immediately. At the end of the talk someone asked him if he thought his move was permanent and he said “yes” and mentioned again how it just felt like he was using Vim in Emacs.
About half way through the talk he gives a demonstration meant to show the (Vim using) audience some of the powers of Emacs. It was very informative and if you’re thinking about trying out Emacs, you should take a look. The entire talk is about 40 minutes so you’ll need to schedule some time.
Here at the International Irreal Headquarters, we’ve felt this way for some time:
In a few years there'll be enough computers in your home that getting hacked and being haunted will be functionally indistinguishable.
— Cliff (@moonpolysoft) September 14, 2014