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{ Author Archives } Mark Eli Kalderon

I am an analytic philosopher teaching at University College London. I am also the current editor of the Aristotelian Society. According to the present deformation professionnelle my work is in M&E (metaphysics and epistemology).

Habermas Meta-Tweet

Wow! A meta-tweet from Jurgen Habermas:

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2010 01 29 Text Comments (0)

Git Users Survey 2009

The Git Users Survey 2009 is out. If you are a Git user, take the time to fill it out.

2009 07 17 git Comments (0)

Flashbake or Git Gateway Technology?

Flashbake aims to bring version control to writers—or at least writers who have harnessed the power of plain text. Flahsbake is a simplified front end to Git that runs in the background automatically committing changes and recording various ambient information as you write (such as what you were listening to when the commit was made).

Written […]

2009 05 14 Text
git
version control Comments (0)

Typography and Poetry

I wonder how many typographers are closet poets. My last post presented a charming verse of doggerel by Berton Braley. Apparently he is not the only poet-typographer.

View H_FJ’s tweet

By the way, in a previous post when I wrote:

I would like to support small type foundries by buying their fonts. There are some brilliant […]

2009 05 12 Typography Comments (0)

On the Cognitive Utility of Typography

For art in printing is not the way Of wild extravagance, weird display, But rather the unobtrusive thrall Of type that gives you no shock at all, But draws your eye to the page with zest And holds your mind to the thought expressed; We must keep […]

2009 03 07 Typography Comments (0)

On a Need to Know Basis

Advanced features of LaTeX are best learned on a need to know basis. The LaTeX Companion can be daunting in its length. If you thought you needed to master all of that material before writing a LaTeX document you would never do so. So start simple, and learn how to do more advanced things as […]

2009 01 25 LaTeX
Markup Comments (2)

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

More evidence of typographic rage: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I have posted on this phenomenon before, here, here, here, and here. Perhaps I need a new tag for this issue.

However, it’s the difference wherein the interest lies. Unlike obsessing about straight versus typographic quotes this is more straightforwardly a “semantic” issue about the […]

2009 01 18 Typography Comments (2)

Dirty Prompts

Playing with your bash prompt can seem like nothing more than an idle diversion. It is an idle diversion, it is just the “nothing more” bit that I would argue with. In a previous post I discussed how the bash prompt can reflect what git branch you are on. Now that’s useful. Seriously. But what […]

2009 01 16 UNIX
git
version control Comments (0)

Font Restrictions

As I have remarked before, good typography does not merely have aesthetic virtue. Importantly, it has cognitive virtue as well. Good typesetting makes your work easier to understand. A good font is but one element of typesetting, and a font may be appropriate to one context but not others. Still, font choice is one of […]

2009 01 04 Academic Publishing
Font
PDF
Text
Typography Comments (2)

Gist-ing from TextMate

Well that didn’t take long. In an earlier post, I remarked that with command line support for Gist, the git powered pastebin service, TextMate support for Gist was now within reach. There is now a gist command in the GitHub bundle. You can either post private or public gists. The gist that figured in the […]

2008 11 26 Text
TextMate
git
version control Comments (0)

LaTeX TODO

The Problem

One of the great features of using TextMate to produce LaTeX documents is the TODO Bundle. The TODO Bundle let’s you to insert TODOs into comments and display these in a nicely formatted HTML window with links to the lines where the TODOs occurred.12

There are two limitations with the TODO Bundle, however, which made […]

2008 11 23 Text Comments (2)

iPhone Blogging

Would you really want to blog from your iPhone? While Twitter apps really come into their own on mobile devices, blogging is a longer form not well suited for text input on an iPhone. Nevertheless, part of me is glad that it can be done. This post is being written on my iPhone thanks to […]

2008 11 19 Blog Comments (0)

Progress

Git commits by day and hour on the Philosophy BibTeX project.

Been working on some scripts to clean up the BibTeX file, to normalize cite keys, to render consistent author and journal names, to strip out local URLs, etc. So look forward to a new development branch and a directory of utilities.

2008 11 09 Text Comments (0)

Donald Knuth no Ringo Starr

Donald Knuth is renowned for offering a bounty for bugs found in TeX. Many of these checks remain forever uncashed, the recipients rightly regarding the signed check an honor greater than the money it represents. Sadly, this practice has come to an end. No Donald Kuth has not died, nor is he, like Ringo Starr, […]

2008 10 31 TeX Comments (0)

Google Book Search

Google Book Search, a surprisingly controversial if welcome Google app, has reached a ground breaking settlement. See here. A highlight: US users—alas not me, an expatriate American—will have access to out of print but not out of copyright books as well as the ability to buy these. Of course there is more. See also the […]

2008 10 29 Academic Publishing Comments (0)

Akismet Stats

Akismet, Matt Mullenweg’s anti-spam WordPress plugin, now provides statistics. These statistics are displayed in useful graphics. In checking them out, I was struck by the following graph:

That’s a sharp downturn in spam. I know that this is a little read technical blog by an academic, but there has been no corresponding downturn in traffic that […]

2008 10 20 Blog Comments (0)

Naming Tabs in Leopard Terminal

Leopard’s terminal was a huge improvement, but issues remain. One of the welcome additions to the terminal was tabs, but there is no way to name them. With a number of tabs open, this can make navigation tedious. If only there were a convenient way to name tabs. Thanks to Erik Anderson there is. Terminal.app […]

2008 10 20 Terminal
Text Comments (0)

GMU drops Endnote Support

In what is widely regarded as a nuisance suit, Thomson Reuters, the maker of Endnote, is suing GMU for their support in developing the open source bibliographic software Zotero. For more on the controversy see here, here, and here.

In a recent announcement, GMU reports that they will be dropping their Endnote license:

With litigation […]

2008 10 12 Bibliography Comments (0)

Command Line Gist

As I posted earlier, gist is a Git powered pastebin service. Very handy. Handier still would be a command line interface to gist. Thanks to Github’s own Chris Wanstrath, aka defunkt, a command line interface with gist is now a reality.

To install:

curl http://github.com/defunkt/gist/tree/master%2Fgist.rb?raw=true > gist && chmod 755 gist && sudo mv gist /usr/local/bin/gist

Some usage examples:

cat file.txt […]

2008 10 11 git
version control Comments (2)

Great Wall of China

China has blocked access to GitHub. See here

2008 10 10 git
version control Comments (0)
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