Monthly Archives: August 2012

Jon Bentley on Quicksort

Posted on 2012-08-22 by jcs

One of my heroes in Jon Bentley. If you don’t know who he is, this post is for you. If you do know who he is, this post is also for you. Bentley is one of the original Bell Labs … Continue reading →

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A Malware Debugging Tool From Google

Posted on 2012-08-21 by jcs

After Irreal’s recent malware incident I’ve been keeping an eye out for ways to avoid any further exploits and for taking remedial action in case Irreal is reinfected. The particular piece of malware that attacked Irreal was only interested in … Continue reading →

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A Small But Nice Change to the Org-Mode Build Process

Posted on 2012-08-20 by jcs

As regular readers know, I’m a great admirer of Org-mode; I use it everyday to, among other things, write these blog posts, maintain my todo list, manage projects, and keep several other files up to date. I generally track the … Continue reading →

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Imagine That

Posted on 2012-08-19 by jcs

For years the music industry has been whining about the digital apocalypse in general and streaming in particular. They were steadfast in their refusal to consider embracing new business models and held firm to the model that had always worked … Continue reading →

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Emacs Coding Systems

Posted on 2012-08-18 by jcs

Those of us with, ahem, extensive experience can remember when ASCII was pretty much all there was. Happily, things are much different and better today. Now Unicode is all but universal and, in the U.S. at least, UTF-8 is king. … Continue reading →

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The Many Faces of Regex

Posted on 2012-08-17 by jcs

One of a programmer’s most useful tools, Jamie Zawinski notwithstanding, is regular expressions. In a strictly Lisp world, s-expressions solve an astounding number of problems but in the real world of mixed technologies regexes are an incredibly useful and necessary … Continue reading →

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Two Factor Authentication for Gmail

Posted on 2012-08-16 by jcs

Mat Honan’s terrifying tale of being hacked should make all of us examine our digital security closely. If, like me and many others, a significant part of your life is lived or stored on-line, Honan’s story makes clear how vulnerable … Continue reading →

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More You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Posted on 2012-08-15 by jcs

One hardly knows what to make of the Megaupload fiasco. On the one hand, Kim Dotcom hardly seems the picture of innocence. On the other hand, the worst that could be said of him is that there is some evidence … Continue reading →

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Whither TextMate?

Posted on 2012-08-14 by jcs

Allan Odgaard recently announced that he is open sourcing the popular Mac editor TextMate. I’ve long considered it one of the few editors suitable for serious programmers so I treated the announcement as good news. It means that (what I … Continue reading →

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When SSL Is Not SSL

Posted on 2012-08-13 by jcs

Troy Hunt has a nice post on SSL and how many sites misuse it. As Hunt says, SSL is not about encryption. The problem that Hunt is writing about is sites that deliver a login page, say, in http and … Continue reading →

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