Tag Archives: Tech

Although you may not have heard anything from Mike Zamansky lately, he’s still blogging—mostly about teaching—and maintaining an active presence on the Web. He just retired from Hunter so perhaps he’ll find time to enlighten us with a Using Emacs … Continue reading →

PDF. It’s a ubiquitous standard that seems like it’s always been here. How else would you prepare a document that could be printed on virtually any printer or displayed on any screen in the best possible resolution? But, it turns … Continue reading →

There’s a charming piece of foundation lore that every programmer in my cohort read and admired: The Story of Mel. Even when I was writing assembly language exclusively, the story was about a bygone era and techniques that no one … Continue reading →

Younger Irreal readers whose memories don’t extent beyond the start of the century may be puzzled by my occasional disparaging of Microsoft. After all, they’ve made a point, lately, of reciting all the appropriate open source mantras and cultivating a … Continue reading →

I’ve been a Unix-head working exclusively in one flavor or another of Unix for more years than I care to contemplate. These days, I seldom see a Unix workflow tip that I didn’t already know about. Still, I do sometimes … Continue reading →

If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of the Model M keyboard and even had one that I lost at my last job when I left. Fortunately, Unicomp resurrected the Model M and … Continue reading →

Nir Eyal has an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about the horrible, Orwellian practice of businesses using spyware to monitor what their employees are doing. Even putting aside the Stasi element, it should be clear to anyone with … Continue reading →

Many of you know that I’m a big fan of AWK. After Lisp and C, it’s my go to language, especially for scripts that involve reading a bunch of lines and performing some sort of regex-mediated action on them. Its … Continue reading →

Even before I learned Lisp, I really loved coding with recursive algorithms. When I decided to learn Lisp, I did so through Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp, which meant, of course, that recursive programming became part of my programming DNA. … Continue reading →