Monthly Archives: August 2012

Emacs Compilation Errors

Posted on 2012-08-12 by jcs

Over at the Definitely a plug blog there’s a very nice mini-tutorial on using the Emacs compilation facility. When you use 【Meta+x】 compile to run a compilation process, Emacs will parse the error output and allow you to step through … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 1 Comment

Forensics with DRAKMA

Posted on 2012-08-11 by jcs

I ran across the Open States Website, which provides information on legislative activity for many (and eventually all) of the U.S. states. They have an API that allows you to query information via http and get answers formatted as JSON. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Now Let’s All Enjoy A Moment of Schadenfreude

Posted on 2012-08-10 by jcs

ZDNet is reporting that SCO is in Chapter 7 and thus effectively dead. They’ve been in Chapter 11 since 2007 and really had no hope of getting out so this news is not surprising. Those of us with memories of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Reusability and NIH

Posted on 2012-08-09 by jcs

Peter Donis has a nice post discussing a programming challenge given to Knuth and critiqued by McIlroy. Don Knuth, certainly one the premier computer scientists (period) was asked to demonstrate literate programming by solving a simple problem involving finding the … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | 9 Comments

Even The New York Times Is Getting A Clue

Posted on 2012-08-08 by jcs

The New York Times Sunday Review has an interesting article on piracy. They invoke the common metaphor of Whac-A-Mole and conclude that Internet piracy is not going away and that the content industry is fooling themselves to believe otherwise. They … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Emacs Configuration File

Posted on 2012-08-07 by jcs

Xah Lee has an interesting post on organizing your emacs init file in which he advocates breaking your .emacs or init.el file into several subfiles. Generally when people do this they organize the subfiles by category or function—all the items … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 8 Comments

The Dropbox Breakin

Posted on 2012-08-06 by jcs

Much is being made of the supposed Dropbox break in. Several users reported that they started receiving spam at email addresses that were only used with their Dropbox accounts. Dropbox, to their credit, immediately launched an investigation and brought in … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Tips for Using Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2012-08-05 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has a nice post entitled Tips on Emacs Lisp programming. The post has been mentioned by many of the Emacs aggregators but it’s a nice post and worth a shout out. Ferrier takes the position that Elisp is … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Prompting for User Input with Elisp

Posted on 2012-08-04 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice tutorial on getting user input with Emacs Lisp. Most Elisp programmers are aware of the interactive control strings for this purpose and most of us probably use that for most occasions requiring user input: (defun … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A New PDF Version of SICP

Posted on 2012-08-03 by jcs

Long time readers know of my love affair with Abelson & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I regard it as certainly one of the best and arguably the best computer science books ever written. MIT Press, in a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment