Monthly Archives: June 2013

My Solution to the Last Elisp Challenge

The challenge was to convert the output from dstat so that all the bytes values (some of which are given as kilobytes or megabytes) to just bytes. Thus, 2k would become 2048 and 3M would become 3145728. Similarly, dstat outputs … Continue reading

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The Hipsters and the Designer

Editorial note: I wrote this a few weeks ago (before WWDC) but didn’t publish it because it seemed a bit ranty. Now Apple has revealed iOS 7 and its icons and the hipsters are still yak yak yaking about them. … Continue reading

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Quickutil

Robert Smith and Eitarow Fukamachi have started a really interesting new project: Quickutil. The idea is to do for small Lisp utilities what Quicklisp does for Lisp libraries. Smith explains it all on his SYMBO1ICS IDEAS blog but the TL;DR … Continue reading

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European Lisp Symposium

Here are links to the talks from the European Lisp Symposium from this June. There were some technical problems but most of the talks were captured. These are audio links and in some cases the accompanying slides (as PDFs). If … Continue reading

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Regular Expressions and Emacs Lisp

Over at What keramida said…, Giorgos Keramidas poses an interesting problem. Given the following output from dstat, get rid of the B, k, and M suffixes by converting them into bytes. —-system—- —-total-cpu-usage—- –net/eth0- -dsk/total- sda- time |usr sys idl … Continue reading

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Email and Encryption

In view of the NSA brouhaha, I’ve been thinking about encrypted email as a first step in keeping my private business private. Like most of you, I’m the proverbial “nothing to hide” netizen but I also have an instinctive dislike … Continue reading

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Cracking Passwords

Last May, Ars Technica published a chilling article on password cracking that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. I urge you to take a look at it even if you’re just a user but especially if you … Continue reading

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Quickdocs Documentation

Quickdocs keeps getting better and better. Now they have nicely formatted documentation for the Quicklisp packages. These are nice enough and easy enough to access that I use them for my primary package documentation. They’re a lot easier to bring … Continue reading

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Marc Battyani Interview

Vsevolod Dyomkin has another great entry in his series of interviews with Lisp hackers over at Lisp, The Universe and Everything. This time it’s with Marc Battyani, a Lisp hacker and entrepreneur whose company, NovaSparks, builds ultra-low-latency FPGA-based supercomputers for … Continue reading

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Lisp Web Tales

Pavel Penev is writing a book, Lisp Web Tales, about Web applications and Common Lisp. He describes it as a set of tutorials and examples. I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time because it seems like a … Continue reading

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