Monthly Archives: May 2011

As I Was Saying

No sooner had I pushed my Bad Passwords post than I stumbled on this post by Marc Bevand over at Zorinaq. Bevand reports that VISA’s Verified by VISA authentication system forces users to select weak passwords (this may not be … Continue reading

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Bad Passwords

Alternative title: Good Grief. It’s absolutely incredible how clueless people still are about password security. You would think that anyone using the Web today would be aware of the numerous compromises that involve weak passwords. Apparently not. Over at Naked … Continue reading

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Sorting With Emacs

Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has a great post on sorting in Emacs. Did you know you can sort by regular expressions? I didn’t. Get over there and read the post; it’s well worth your time. In fact, you might … Continue reading

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The Future of Books

Over at Blog Kindle, Matthew has a post that asks if the Kindle is destroying the publishing industry. Matthew’s main point is that books have always been evolving and are continuing to evolve today. The most significant aspect of the … Continue reading

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Living the Digital Life

A year or two ago I almost completely abandoned paper, pencils, and pens. I made a point of taking all my notes on one of my computers or my iPhone. I removed all the note pads and writing instruments from … Continue reading

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Emacs for Prose

Urpo Lankinen over at the Avarthrel Blog has a post about coming home to Emacs for writing prose—specifically novels. Although he’s a longtime Emacs user, he’s long been wandering in the wilderness looking for a good writer’s editor. Emacs was … Continue reading

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Another Emacs Trick

I just stumbled across another feature of Emacs that is new to me. If you save files by typing C-x s, then for each dirty buffer Emacs will ask if you want to save it. By answering d Emacs will … Continue reading

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A Practical Application of Gray Codes

Gray codes are a way of encoding a a sequence of integers {0, 1, 2, …, n} so that the binary representation of adjacent integers differs by only 1 bit. For example, the1 Gray encoding for the sequence {0, 1, … Continue reading

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Expanding File Names in Guile

I really like Guile but one very annoying thing about it is that it doesn’t expand file paths. If you want to load a file outside the current directory you have to specify the complete path. Emacs has a very … Continue reading

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Literate Programming and GTD With Org Mode

Over at Eden Cardim’s Blog, there are a couple of nice posts about GTD (Getting Things Done) with Emacs Org Mode. One interesting thing about the posts is that Cardim uses the Literate Programming approach to his .emacs file but … Continue reading

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