Category: Article

What it means to "pay attention"

When you learn to value your own time, you will learn to value other people’s time.
You may even put a dollar amount on the value of your time (though you are likely to choose too small of a number).
The reason that we use the expression “paying attention to N” is that out of respect for ourselves, and others, we give 100% focus to what we are doing.
To do anything else would be something akin to “throwing away money”.

Never say that you "don't have time"

Never say that you “do not have time for N”. Instead say that you “do not value N”.
Every time you utter the former phrase, you teach yourself to ignore what is really going on, and you will eventually believe what you are telling yourself.
That isn’t to say that you may, or even should, say this out loud.
Keep it to yourself, and you will find things becoming easier for you to stomach.

A lightweight philosophy for an Emacs keymap

Any approach for your desired keymap in Emacs is possible. My current philosophy under development is to keep things as close to “stock” as possible. The idea is that I won’t run into many collisions, and bindings will be generally documented quite well, and that is less work for me. What is my plan?
First, it is really simple. The F keys are nice to use, but far away, and the first handful are bound anyway. Looking at 1…0 though, are those really critical? Well that depends. Unless you pass numeric to functions to functions a lot, then feel free to rebind them. That brings 10 keys to be bound that are quite comfortable to use being so easy to reach, that is a very easy fix.
Second, I overload bindings whenever possible. org-mode C-c C-c binding is really delightful. There are a bunch of situations where given the context, hitting C-c C-c, 80% of the time will do “the right thing” for that situation. It is really pleasant to use. My version is pretty basic actually. The thing is that I like the VC bindings in Emacs even if they only operate on one file at a time, I love the workflow.
As such, I’m calling vc-next-action and log-edit done a lot of times every day. In the spirit of “saving keystrokes” and “micro-optimizations” it kind of jumped out at me that I’m wasting some time constantly hitting C-x s to save the buffer (despite having real-auto-save running quite aggressively), C-x vv to initiate the commit, fill the log message, and C-c C-c to finalize the commit. Well, that doesn’t sound like much, but trust me it is!
My override was to first find the easiest number key for me to reach with my right hand, that is 9, and bind C-9 to vc-next action. Adding some advice to vc-next-action, save-buffer is called so that doesn’t require a keystroke. After filling out the buffer, log-edit is bound to to C-9 but only in log edit mode. In that case, defadvice and C-9 make it a little simpler and so much faster. My tentative goal is to make C-9 “just do the right thing” in most situations, we’ll see where that goes.
Those are my two beliefs right now… any more lightweight and it wouldn’t even exist.

How to install R on OSX 10.9 Mavericks as of 2014-06-01T19:29:55-0500

Here is how to install R on OSX 10.9 Mavericks as of 2014-06-01T19:29:55-0500:

brew install gcc
brew tap homebrew/science
brew install R

Details:

gcr@orion:~> gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.8.3
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
gcr@orion:~> r --version
R version 3.1.0 (2014-04-10) -- "Spring Dance"
Copyright (C) 2014 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.2.0 (64-bit)
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License versions 2 or 3.
For more information about these matters see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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How may one be sure that the OSX computer is actually asleep?

OSX provides many pleasant energy saving features. It is so efficient that it is difficult to know whether or not the machine is turned off (or sleeping) or just the screen is turned off. Trying to determine a method to answer that question I found many approaches that relied too much upon poorly understood features and nothing as clear as “there is a little light turned on” simply because there is no light and no clear answer assumedly. Probably that is by design. Eventually I suppose that the logical end is to learn about how the system level flags that prevent sleep (compiled or not) interact with the energy saving mechanism.