Howardism

12 February 2026 To resuscitate my blog, I thought I would join this month’s Emacs Carnival, with a suggested topic of Completion and talk about completion in my favorite subject, Emacs Lisp.

Has it really been almost a decade since I first started pontificating about Literate Devops?

8 March 2025 An idea of using pandoc to archive Internet articles, essays and blog entries as Org files.

18 October 2024 Revisiting my decade-old demonstration code, I created a new approach.

3 December 2023 This year’s EmacsConf was really good with some interesting talks and ideas.

26 April 2023 While working on a web interface spitting out JSON, I wish I had a jq-like interface in Emacs.

16 Jan 2023 What if find-file in Emacs, along with the file’s name, could display more information, like the title or tags of an org-formatted file?

Yes, Mastodon is the talk of the tubes, and I’m glad this new federated service has its day in the sun.

3 Dec 2022 During EmacsConf 2022, I gave a lightning talk with 10 minutes (actually 14) to present the top 10 Reasons why you Retry Eshell.

30 May 2021 While I'm intrigued with the Pomodoro Technique… you know, where you work in discrete time segments, with equally discrete break intervals.

25 Dec 2020 When starting a long process, I prefix a shell command with beep, a shell script I wrote to alert when the process had completed.

23 Dec 2020 Other than editing buffer, the most common user interface in Emacs is completing-read, which allows you to select an item from a list of choices.

17 Jul 2020 I use three different browsers, but I really want all of them to be as mouse-less as possible.

3 Nov 2019 While awfully early for folks like me in the Pacific Timezone, I really enjoyed EmacsConf 2019 (I’ve never attended a conference in my pajamas before).

27 Jan 2019 Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.”

20 Jun 2018 Continuing my multi-year quest to craft a pensieve made of code and text files, I've been lately focusing on ways to quickly copy content from various sources into this text mind.

22 Mar 2018 While all projects take longer than expected, good ones where the craftsman cares about the quality, require even more time, but now I am can type a review on my new keyboard.io, I love the results.

8 Apr 2018 While the primary goal of code reviews is better software quality, we can't loose sight of two other critical goals: Creating better programmers Creating cohesive teams that collaborate well These two bullets have got me thinking, and thought I…

22 Oct 2017 Gave a demonstration of EShell to both the PDX and London Emacs User groups.

21 Apr 2017 Last night, interested Emacsians from around the PDX area gathered together for a hack night, with a goal to implement a rudimentary, breadcrumb project.

25 Sep 2016 Just because we need a lot of organizational support characters in your text files doesn't mean you have to physically type them all.

Next month, I will be hosting a workshop on regular expressions at Open Source Bridge.

1 May 2016 I was asked to review the new Kinesis Foot Pedal, and while I have a wee bit to tell you, I was really intrigued with how I could use it towards our ever increasing goal of getting more power with fewer finger movements.

1 Apr 2016 In this old essay by Steve Yegge, he has a nice synthesis of static vs dynamic types, but also includes lots of interesting observations on Emacs (one would have to, since static vs. dynamic is almost as old a debate as emacs vs. vi).

30 Mar 2016 While I never intended to make Org Mode look or behave like a word processor, but with slight tweaks every now and then, that is my end result.

17 Mar 2016 Yesterday, I hosted a workshop on Literate Programming with org-mode for the PDX Emacs Hackers group.

6 Jan 2016 If you haven't used imenu in Emacs, you should try it.

16 Nov 2015 Sure we should program as if we are writing for our team mates, but writing code for people is far less precise, for what might be readable to one, may be Perl code to another.

8 Nov 2015 My daughter read a book about Ada Lovelace, which generated discussion about Alan Turing, which generated discussions about computers, which showed me how much kids not only don’t know about computers, but how unlikely they are to understand the

29 Oct 2015 Had a good time at the first Portland Emacs Hackers meetup.

1 Oct 2015 My current dayjobgig is building private clouds, and I'm surprised at how much context switching I need to do due to waiting for the bloody things to deploy.

30 Sep 2015 Each week, I teach an after school class at my local Middle School.

1 Sep 2015 I was asked to speak about Literate Devops at EmacsConf 2015.

12 Aug 2015 I’ve collected some table formatting code for OpenStack’s nova command, and placed them in an Tower of Babel file that make :post commands in org-mode files able to use them.

10 Aug 2015 For your own projects, you can commit to Git anytime, but one of the advantages of committing frequently is sharing code…either to your team mates or even to yourself.

Today I got around to playing around with the wrap and the post options to org-mode source blocks, and updated my Literate Devops essay, to help explain how I email my formatted notes directly to my team mates.

17 May 2015 I have been in many meetings over the years where the presenter's screen is more of a distraction.

10 Apr 2015 While I seldom leave Emacs, I do dabble on the shell from time to time, and many colleagues ask about my terminal usage with tmux, so I present my very-opinionated Getting Started Guide to TMux.

9 Apr 2015 I swore I wouldn’t put any more examples of my literate devops idea, but when I habitually used org-mode during a recent exploration of MySQL database instance, followed by emailing the results to my teammates, I thought I would share.

21 Mar 2015 On the Macintosh, the Finder can trigger a script due to any change of a file in a directory (Apple calls these Folder Actions).

10 Mar 2015 I’ve discovered the ultimate in Yak Shaving: Gnu Shaving!

22 Feb 2015 After reading the Wired article, Why We Should Design Some Things to Be Difficult to Use, I finally realize that Emacs should be hard to use, and we really should just give up changing it to be easier for new-comers.

20 Feb 2015 In Emacs, a key sequence is special key binding that uses multiple keys in a series.

16 Feb 2015 I’m not saying the Emacs Way is objectively better, but you may find your work-style improved if you incorporate this way in your workflow.

17 Jan 2015 I have played with a lot of window managers, and while many claim to be unobtrusive and minimal, I really just want Emacs in full-screen mode.

23 Dec 2014 Manipulating the commit history in Emacs isn’t as straight-forward as other Magit processes, so I thought I would share my notes.

6 Dec 2014 Saw this video with Woz, where he describes how he wanted every trace on the original Apple board to be placed where the chips would be in the best position.

26 Nov 2014 Maintaining servers falls into two phases: First, bang head until server works; second, capture effort into some automation tool like Puppet or Chef.

25 Nov 2014 I like to publish only positive essays on my blog, and I’ve been conflicted about publishing my perspective on perching on Paul Graham’s shoulders to extend his essay on the Hundred-Year Language.

30 Oct 2014 After many years of teaching Scratch at my local elementary school, I decided to start teaching an after-school session at my local Middle School.