Monthly Archives: July 2013

A Beginning Emacs Tutorial

Posted on 2013-07-13 by jcs

Jekor (aka Chris Forno) has an excellent beginning Emacs video up on YouTube. It’s the first in a planned series so it just covers the very basics. The video has great production values. Jekor highlights items he’s discussing so it’s … Continue reading →

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The Good Guys and Bad

Posted on 2013-07-12 by jcs

There’s a tiny ISP in Utah, USA. It has a sole proprietor and very limited resources. Still, it does what few others are willing or able to do. For the last 15 years, Xmission has refused to honor any request … Continue reading →

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AT&T: All Your Data Are Belong To Us

Posted on 2013-07-11 by jcs

Editorial Note: In the aftermath of the NSA revelations, I’ve been writing more and more posts on privacy and ways to help secure it. From this post on I will use the tag “Privacy” to mark these. AT&T, my wireless … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.9 Is Out

Posted on 2013-07-10 by jcs

The latest version of Steel Bank Common Lisp, 1.1.9, is out and available at the usual place. As always, the system built and tested without problems on my MacBook Pro and iMac. The big news this month is that SBCL … Continue reading →

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Reproducible Research Redux

Posted on 2013-07-09 by jcs

Longtime readers know that I’m a big fan of reproducible research and, specifically, the way that Emacs and Org mode help make it possible. Here’s a very nice video presentation from SciPy2013 by John Kitchin. He describes how he writes … Continue reading →

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Locate and Emacs

Posted on 2013-07-08 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at the excellent Emacs Redux tells us something that I didn’t know: It’s possible to call locate from Emacs. For those of you without a Unix background, locate is a utility that will return a list of … Continue reading →

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Perfect Forward Secrecy

Posted on 2013-07-07 by jcs

If, like me, you’re unsettled by the recent government(s) snooping you are probably looking for ways to secure your on-line activities. One obvious way is to use SSL/TLS whenever possible. If you use Firefox or Chrome, HTTPS Everywhere can help. … Continue reading →

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Take Your Lockdown and …

Posted on 2013-07-06 by jcs

For those of you still mourning the demise of Google Reader there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that, as usual, Netizens have stepped in and provided alternatives. I’m using Feedly and am happy with it but … Continue reading →

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Snail Mail Too

Posted on 2013-07-05 by jcs

Here’s another reason, if you needed one, to forego snail mail. Forget the latency and cost; it turns out that the USPS takes pictures of both sides of every envelope they process. This is analogous to the NSA’s wholesale collection … Continue reading →

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Multiparadigm Elisp

Posted on 2013-07-04 by jcs

I got a pointer to an interesting Wilfred Hughes post from this Magnar Sveen tweet. The post, Adventures in Multi Paradigm Programming, looks at the power and flexibility of Emacs Lisp. One often hears how Elisp is a crappy language … Continue reading →

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