Monthly Archives: August 2013

A Bit More On Lavabit

Posted on 2013-08-11 by jcs

Forbes has a bit more information on the closing of Lavabit. They provide additional clues that Ladar Levison of Lavabit was indeed asked to monitor users’ logins in order to capture their keys. Among other things, we learn that Levison … Continue reading →

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A Lisp Bookshelf

Posted on 2013-08-10 by jcs

Mozart Reina has a post up about his Lisp bookshelf. It’s a nice collection of books that anyone wanting to master Lisp should read. My favorite, SICP, is there as is Lisp in Small Pieces a book I very much … Continue reading →

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The Price of Integrity

Posted on 2013-08-09 by jcs

Those of you who who follow Irreal daily know that I recently migrated the email that was going to my Gmail account to Lavabit. All of that mail was from technical mailing lists so it didn’t really matter much except … Continue reading →

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No Exceptions

Posted on 2013-08-08 by jcs

Personally, I think the only thing to do is to go back to the original sense of the Fourth Amendment and say, no warrantless wiretapping, no general warrants, no surveillance without specific probable cause, no exceptions, ever. There shouldn’t even … Continue reading →

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Open Access: A Tipping Point

Posted on 2013-08-07 by jcs

For some time now there’s been a movement within academia for open access to their research results. Many professors, especially those in Mathematics, have pledged not to publish in closed journals. The paid journals, of course, hate this and have … Continue reading →

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Elisp Namespaces

Posted on 2013-08-06 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has posted an interesting proposal to bring namespaces to Emacs Lisp. His ideas seem both reasonable and doable. One of Elisp’s big problems is the lack of a namespace system. We end up with a bunch of nasty … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Timeline

Posted on 2013-08-05 by jcs

Jamie Zawinski has an interesting old post on Emacs history. It’s a timeline of Emacs versions from Stallman’s, Moon’s, and Steele’s original merger of TECMAC and TMACS in 1976 to Gnu Emacs 22.1 and XEmacs 21.4.21 in 2007. His original … Continue reading →

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Fred Brooks on Computer Science

Posted on 2013-08-04 by jcs

Someone posted an old address by Fred Brooks, author of the celebrated The Mythical Man-Month, given on the occasion of his acceptance of the ACM Allen Newell Award in 1994. It’s an interesting talk and one that I hadn’t read … Continue reading →

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Troy Hunt on SQL Injection

Posted on 2013-08-03 by jcs

The invaluable Troy Hunt has an excellent post on SQL injection attacks. We all know the basic ideas behind SQL injection but Hunt shows how attackers actually mount the attacks and why they work. It’s extraordinary that these attacks still … Continue reading →

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Updating to Org Mode 8

Posted on 2013-08-02 by jcs

I just upgraded Org mode to version 8.0.6. I’ve been holding off waiting for org2blog to fix some incompatibilities. Mostly, the transition went smoothly. By following the commentary in the release notes and the new installation instructions I had everything … Continue reading →

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