Category: Article

I Wasted Time with a Custom Prompt for R with ESS

I wanted a custom prompt for R with ESS. I wanted a double struck R. I probably did it wrong. It never worked. Actually it worked most of the time, and that is worse than never working. Kind people helped me. I still got it wrong. I take full responsibility. It was better not to do it. If you want to try, here is where I left it.

.Rprofile

Make the ℝ prompt stand out (be sure to tell ESS how to handle this): 

options(prompt="ℝ> ")

.emacs.el

Tell ESS how to handle my custom prompt: 

(setq inferior-ess-primary-prompt "ℝ> ")

Handle the custom ℝ prompt in ess. Don’t use custom here. 

(setq inferior-S-prompt "[]a-zA-Z0-9.[]*\\(?:[>+.] \\)*ℝ+> ")

Three Nice Looking Diff Tools and My Pick

1 Desire

Diff’s are hard. 80% of the time they are simple and fast. 20% of the time they are, well, complicated! My days of text-only diffs are coming to an end. They remain a part of my toolbox but I want a grown-up GUI diff tool. Fortunately there are plenty of options. But how to choose?

  • My decision making process was pretty simple: write down questions about them and answer them in a big spreadsheet
  • See where that takes me
  • Make a decision

Here is how it went.

Continue reading “Three Nice Looking Diff Tools and My Pick”

Speed Up FileVault2 Decryption

FileVault2 (FV2) provides disk encryption for OSX. I am unfamiliar with it.
I read about it at the Apple website. It doesn’t explain much. I wanted to know
how OSX handles it. To learn I tried it out.
After installing OSX I turned on FV2. The encryption was seamless. 8GB in 15m.
I installed 58GiB more of applications and copied files. Then I wanted to
re-provision the machine.
I booted into an external drive with OSX 10.9 (10.9) on it. I erased the disk on
the box. When I erased it I was asked for a new password. I provided it. I am
guessing that FV2 wanted a new password. I booted back into 10.9 and OSX
reported that FV2 is turned on. Seems like you can’t just wipe a FV2
encrypted partition. I asked OSX to decrypt the partition. It did and I tried
erasing the partition again and it worked fine. Going through the provisioning
process again I found that decrypting 58GiB takes about 2 hours.
Some experimentation left with the plan that when I want to re-provision a OSX
box I will erase the partition and re-image it and boot into it to decrypt the
partition. Surely there are command line tools to do so. I did investigate
that people I want directions that anyone may follow in the UI.