Thu 07 September 2017 | -- (permalink)

sed, the Unix stream editor, is usually only the right tool for a job if the job is a quick-n-dirty hack, but occasionally one needs to do that, or one needs to embed some whacky thing in a shell script on a system with minimal Unix tools, or whatever. In …

Tue 05 September 2017 | -- (permalink)

Python went missing after a routine brew update. Well, sort of.

It turns out that this is just a naming ideology thing. On pretty much every platform these days, the name python is really an alias for python2, which in turn is an alias for python2.7. No doubt this …

Mon 04 September 2017 | -- (permalink)

Finally got around to fixing the "Meta" key handling on my laptop so that XQuartz, Terminal, and Emacs would all agree on which key is Meta. A friend asked me to document this.

Emacs

Just works out of the box. Well, if one picks the right box.

I had been …

Mon 04 September 2017 | -- (permalink)

After the Nth time that I've muttered about having found the solution to some pesky technical thing only to have some friend say "Gee, I hope you posted that somewhere", I decided to test whether a blog would be a useful way to handle such things.

Don't expect this to …