I just encountered the strangest behaviour in Emacs. I was editing a shell script, hit C-x b to switch to another buffer, and Emacs suddenly froze with the following message: Pinging <hostname> (Commercial)... Where <hostname was the hostname of a server used in the script. I really do not like the idea of my text...

Ahmad Shadeed wrote a fantastic thing about style queries the other day that I’m still trying to wrap my head around: Recently, the Chrome team released experimental support for a new proposed CSS spec, style queries. In short, they let us query the style of a container, rather than the size only. So the idea is...

While this post is about programming, it also draws an extended analogy to dungeons and dragons, specifically two of its classes, that correspond to two attitudes toward programming. In D&D, wizards study magic. They prepare their magic spells ahead of time. While they may learn a large number of magic spells, they...