Hot on the heels of my web colors rant, comes this amazing piece of Emacs Lisp I now have in my init file: (defun web-color () (interactive) (let ((cols ‘(“AliceBlue” “AntiqueWhite” “Aqua” “Aquamarine” “Azure” “Beige” “Bisque” “Black” “BlanchedAlmond” “Blue” “BlueViolet” “Brown” “BurlyWood” “CadetBlue” “Chartreuse” “Chocolate” “Coral” “CornflowerBlue” “Cornsilk” “Crimson” “Cyan” “DarkBlue” “DarkCyan” “DarkGoldenRod” “DarkGray” “DarkGreen” […]
“Name as many of the web ‘X11 color set’ named colours as you can.” should be the new fizz buzz. I think I’d do pretty good, but would always fall down on the “mediums” and “lights”. “MediumPapayaWhip? LightRosyBrown?”. If it were in an interview situation, I could talk for hours about the faded glory of […]
Thanks to a decreased demand in shaving recently, I discovered several grey facial hairs. It’s happening – I’m becoming a graybeard! The timing is suspicious: I start using Emacs, I turn into a graybeard. But did Emacs cause me to get grey hairs, or did the hairs coerce me into to using Emacs?
My favourite marketing phrase in all of computers is “It Just Works”. It unwittingly represents nearly all of software engineering. It just works. Only just. The absolute minimum. (Side note: my favourite marketing phrase in sports and fashion is “Just Do It”. If you have to do it, only just do it.)
During a particularly-late night coding session, I accidentally discovered that JavaScript now has “numeric separators”. What started as a simple test in my browser console: `dx=100+xo`, would be drailed by a typographical error that revealed a hidden secret… `dx=100_` As I depressed the underscore-instead-of-plus key, Firefox’s auto-evaluator-thingy sprang into action and warned: “Uncaught SyntaxError: underscore […]
You learn something new every day. Today I learned about insect reproductive systems, and also that document.designMode is a thing. Both seemed pretty interesting, but only the latter let’s you make any text on any web site “editable”. Open up the dev console and type document.designMode=”on”, and marvel as you can type over any text […]
I hereby declare my intention to spam a whole tonne of blog posts in the near future. I’ve made this declaration several times in the past – and never managed anything remotely close to “a tonne”, but this time we find a confluence of important factors – contributing to a near-perfect storm. A very-adequate storm. […]
Phewwwweeee. You have no idea how close this URL came to not existing. Of ALL the URLs not existing! Sit back and let me tell you a tale of how I almost let mrspeaker.net – the cornerstone of the Mr Speaker ™ Corporation – be erased from the existance. The story begins not long after […]
Notepad -> HotDog Pro -> HomeSite -> TopStyle (a handful of months) -> NetBeans -> Notepad++ -> Visual Studio -> IntelliJ -> TextMate -> Sublime Text -> Atom ->VSCode (a handful of months) -> Emacs. After so much sampling, I’m 99.6% sure I’m done with this journey. My conclusions from this 30+ year study: choose […]