Monthly Archives: May 2011

Fibonacci Run Times

Posted on 2011-05-14 by jcs

­ This posts combines the results of the last two posts. I thought it would be interesting to compare the actual run times of the three methods of calculating Fibonacci numbers so I put together a Babel table like the … Continue reading →

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Calculating the Fibonacci Numbers

Posted on 2011-05-13 by jcs

If, like me, you’re fascinated by the Fibonacci numbers you should take a look at Robin Houston’s The Worst Algorithm in the World post over at the Bosker Blog. Houston lists and analyzes the three main ways of calculating fib(n): … Continue reading →

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Calling Babel From A Table

Posted on 2011-05-12 by jcs

While I was reading the Lisp Idioms article that I blogged about yesterday, it occurred to me that the first example on accumulating a list presents an excellent opportunity to talk some more about Babel and how to use it … Continue reading →

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An Oldie but Goodie

Posted on 2011-05-11 by jcs

I stumbled across this list of Lisp idioms on Hacker News yesterday. I’ve seen it before and if you’ve been around for a while, you probably have too. Still, it’s always fun to read it again. I enjoy the terse … Continue reading →

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LastPass and the Press

Posted on 2011-05-10 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of posts about LastPass recently, both with praise for the way they are handling a potential security event. One might think that I’m a satisfied customer or even an investor but, in fact, I’d never heard … Continue reading →

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R and Babel

Posted on 2011-05-09 by jcs

I decided to accept my own challenge so I downloaded and installed R. It’s a huge system with a lot to learn but I did manage to figure out enough to generate some basic statistics and a couple graphs. I’ll … Continue reading →

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Doing It Wrong

Posted on 2011-05-08 by jcs

Yesterday, I blogged about a company, LastPass, that takes security seriously and has well thought out procedures in place to protect its users. LastPass is a small company run by relatively young people who have perhaps a decade’s experience in … Continue reading →

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Doing It Right

Posted on 2011-05-07 by jcs

By now, even the non-Geeks among us have heard of the Sony PSN and Online Entertainment break ins and the subsequent loss of personal information and perhaps credit card numbers of over a 100 million Sony customers. Sony admitted that … Continue reading →

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Another region-or-thing Example

Posted on 2011-05-06 by jcs

In my last post on region-or-thing, I promised an example that uses the bounds information that region-or-thing returns. This example is much like the google-search function except that instead of looking up a word or phrase in Google, it turns … Continue reading →

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region-or-thing

Posted on 2011-05-05 by jcs

Emacs Lisp has an amazingly useful function called thing-at-point, which will return the object that the point is currently on. You call it as (thing-at-point THING) where THING is a symbol that specifies the kind of object you want. Possibilities, … Continue reading →

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