Recently in Writing Category

A few weeks ago I picked up the books A Discipline in Programming and Structured Programming. The first is by E. W. Dijkstra and the second includes a large section written by him. I became interested in these books after reading a few of Dijkstra's other papers and about Donald Knuth's great works. The computer science field could stand to have a bit more formalism in it and less hand-waving about "real-world" tools and methodologies.

Here are some quotes that I found especially good.

Yesterday I was looking at a listing of updates for free software projects. I commented that the package moe could be used as a replacement for nano or zile, that is, when you need to quickly edit files from the command-line.

So today I'm giving it a go. I downloaded moe via the GNU project's FTP server and installed it. The compilation was insanely fast, I think it took less than 10 seconds to get it all built and installed.

I hve been re-arranging my TODO lists using Emacs's Org-Mode and when I realized that it could calculate the exact hours taken for a bunch of tasks, I felt I should explore the rest of the Org-Mode manual and see what else I had been missing out on.

Org-Mode allows you to use relative timers which, it says, are useful for recording notes during a meeting or video viewing. I did not understand exactly how to use the relative timers, but it looks like they are like timestamps. Here's a brief run-down and example on how to use them.

Warning: I'm not editing this or re-reading it after writing it. This is a rant though I hope it contains something useful in it.

TechCrunch, a popular tech. news website, posted an article by MG Siegler on how "FasterWeb Wants To Make The Entire Web Up to Ten Times Faster In 2010". FasterWeb is a technology startup that is funded by a venture capital firm called YL Ventures. The article is brief and is not investigative whatsoever, there is hardly meat on the bones of it.

I just stumbled upon the Online Journalism Blog. My entry point was a post on how to make money from [online] content. An interesting topic because it appears that much of the money is made indirectly through advertising, events, etc. What was more interesting, however, was a post on the the death of the interactive presentation tool Flowgram.

The following is a snippet for LaTeX mode in Emacs. The snippet uses the wonderful YASnippet package and inserts the date of the poem being written and a tiny bit of LaTeX around it.

;; LaTeX snippets
(yas/define-snippets
  'latex-mode ; Snippet is available when in LaTeX mode
  '(
    ("poem" ; Keyword that will trigger the snippet
     ; The snippet itself
     ; (Each newline can be replaced with \n to make the snippet fit on one line)
     "\\begin{verse}
\\poemtitle{${1:untitled}}
% Written on ${2:$(format-time-string \"%e %B %Y\")}
$0

\\end{verse}
"
     "begin verse ..." ; Name of the snippet
     nil)
  )
)

There was a 0-day exploit of WordPress mentioned on reddit the other day and I was freaking out a bit and asked for recommendations for a new blog engine. MoveableType was mentioned and so I took a look and I like what I see so far. The static publishing is pretty neat and some of the plugins look good too.