<p>Turns out it’s not only <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2013/06/16/windows-8-has-the-telnet-client-turned-off-by-default/">Windows 8 that has its telnet client disabled</a>, Windows 10 is in the same boat. I’ve been using Windows 10 for quite a while now and just discovered this issue. Anyway, the way to enable is as follows:</p>

<p>Lisp dialects like <a href="http://clojure.org/">Clojure</a> have a very rich set of algorithms that can present altered views on containers without modifying data in the underlying container. This is very important in functional languages as data is immutable and returning copies of containers is costly despite the containers being optimised for copy-on-write. Having these algorithms available prevents unnecessary data copies. While I am not going into mutating algorithms in this post, the…

<p>I’ve mentioned before that I prefer <a href="https://www.mercurial-scm.org/">Mercurial</a> to <a href="https://git-scm.com/">Git</a>, at least for my own work. That said, git has a nice feature that allows you to cherry pick revisions to merge between branches. That’s extremely useful if you want to move a single change between branches and not do a full branch merge. Turns out mercurial has that ability, too, but it goes by a slightly different name.</p>

<p>I still use the <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt email client</a> when I’m remoted into some of my FreeBSD servers. It might not be the most eye pleasing email client ever, but it’s powerful, lightweight and fast.</p>

<p>What do you do if you don’t have dos2unix, need to convert a file or three from DOS (or Mac) format to UNIX format, but all you have is Emacs? Well, of course you use Emacs for the file conversion, what else?</p>

<p>I used XEmacs quite a lot in the 2000s before I switched back to the more stable GNU Emacs. That was back then before GNU Emacs offered a stable official Windows build when XEmacs did, and at the time I was doing a lot of Windows development.</p>

<p>I’ve been an unashamed fan of the old “cheese grater” Mac Pro due to its sturdiness and expandability. Yes, they’re not the most elegant bit of kit out there but they are well built. And most importantly for me, they are expandable by plugging things inside the case, not by creating a Gordian Knot of hubs, Thunderbolt cables, USB cables and stacks of external disks all evenly scattered around a trash can. Oh, and they’re designed to go <strong>under</strong> a…

<p>I’ve been a Xubuntu user for years after switching from OpenSuse. I liked its simplicity and the fact that it just worked out of the box, but I was getting more and more disappointed with Ubuntu packages being out of date, sorry, stable. Having to rebuild a bunch of packages on every install was getting a little old. Well, they did provide material for all those “build XXX on Ubuntu” posts. Recently I’ve been playing with <a href="https://manjaro.org/">Manjaro…

<p>It might sound paradoxical, but in general, writing more code is easier than writing less code that accomplishes the same goals. Even if your code starts out clean, compact and beautiful, the code that is added later to cover the corner cases nobody thought of usually takes care of the code being well designed, elegant and beautiful. Agile programming offers a solution, namely constant refactoring, but who has time for that? That’s why I occasionally give myself the 10% code reduction…

<p>A reader of this blog kindly pointed out that my instructions for <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2016/10/08/how-to-build-gnu-emacs-25-1-on-xubuntu-16-04/">building Emacs 25.1</a> on Ubuntu 16.10 result in a core dump when the build process bootstraps emacs. I only tested the instructions on 16.04 so I hadn’t run into this issue yet.</p>