Tag Archives: Tech

Should We Abandon PDFs?

Posted on 2017-07-06 by jcs

Robert Zaremba thinks we should; at least for publications that aren’t going to end up printed on paper. His argument is that PDFs don’t work well on digital screens. He has a point about PDFs not working very well on … Continue reading →

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Get in the Flow!

Posted on 2017-07-01 by jcs

Via Karl Voit, here’s something you can post on your office door or outside your cubical. Of course, as we all know, it won’t do any good but you’ll feel better. pic.twitter.com/XLeEYUJp78 — Carlos Gustavo Ruiz (@atmantree) June 8, 2017

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Semantic Locality

Posted on 2017-06-05 by jcs

I’m an old time Unix guy who’s still more comfortable on the command line than a big GUI. That’s probably why I enjoy living in Emacs to the extent possible. One of the most powerful concepts from Unix is the … Continue reading →

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An Update on Microsoft’s Move to Git

Posted on 2017-05-29 by jcs

A few months ago, I wrote about Microsoft’s move to git and the scaling problems they were having to overcome. Now Brian Harry has posted an update on their work. They have what they claim is the largest git repository … Continue reading →

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35 Coding Habits to Avoid

Posted on 2017-05-21 by jcs

Christian Maioli Mackeprang has an interesting post on 35 habits that can negatively affect your coding. I’ll let you read them and make your own judgments as to their value for your situation but I’d like to comment on two … Continue reading →

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Russ Cox on Globbing

Posted on 2017-05-19 by jcs

If you’re like me, you probably don’t think about globbing very much. It’s just a way of fuzzy matching file names in a manner reminiscent of regular expression matching. We all use it everyday but have you ever thought about … Continue reading →

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Running Your Life from Your Smart Phone

Posted on 2017-05-11 by jcs

Back in February, I wrote that more and more functions are being moved into our smart phones. That includes things like ATM cards, credit cards, driver licenses, and even unlocking doors. This is something I welcome—although Noonian Atall pushes back … Continue reading →

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Blogs and Journals in Science

Posted on 2017-05-02 by jcs

Blog readers—and since you’re reading this, that includes you—appear to having been doing something right. At least according to Daniel Lakens, an experimental psychologist who publishes the blog The 20% Statistician. In an interesting post, Lakens argues that blogs have … Continue reading →

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Hacker Archetypes

Posted on 2017-04-08 by jcs

Eric Raymond (ESR) has an interesting post on hacker archetypes. The list grew out of a discussion between ESR and one of his regular readers, Susan Sons. At the moment, they’ve identified 8 archetypes. You’ll want to read his post … Continue reading →

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AI Loosely Defined

Posted on 2017-04-01 by jcs

Since this is April 1st and no post will be taken seriously anyway, I offer this piece of wisdom, which Jean-Philippe Paradis retweeted: by today's definition, y=mx+b is an artificial intelligence bot that can tell you where a line is … Continue reading →

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