Monthly Archives: October 2013

Common Lisp Features

A couple of years ago, Lisp luminary Nikodemus Siivola rescued and reposted Abhishek Reddy’s Features of Common Lisp page. It serves as a nice introduction to what makes Common Lisp such a great development environment. It doesn’t, of course, cover … Continue reading

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Building Password Lists

A little while ago Ars Technica published an interesting article on how password crackers build their lists of trial passwords. The TL;DR is that they scan Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, news websites, song lyrics, IRC logs, Twitter, and other sources of … Continue reading

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Running Ping in Emacs

Last year I wrote about my delight in discoverying the Emacs Net Utilities. It’s nice to be able to run a quick ping, traceroute, or even some of the other network utilities right from Emacs. I’ve found, however, that there … Continue reading

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What Foiled Terrorist Plots?

Rick Falkvinge has a great article that makes an obvious point. We can know for sure that government surveillance has foiled exactly zero terror plots. We know this because planning, let alone carrying out, terror plots is a crime but … Continue reading

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The End of Journalism

Many of you know that I’m not a fan of newspapers or most journalists. When reporters aren’t pursuing an agenda or otherwise abdicating their journalistic responsibilities, they run around chasing trivia and sideshows like the seemingly never ending series of … Continue reading

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CrptoSeal Shuts Down

The U.S. Government’s overreaching has claimed another victim. The CryptoSeal VPN service has pulled the plug. These are good guys who did everything possible to provide a secure, private VPN service. They didn’t keep logs and could provide authorities only … Continue reading

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Update on OS X Emacs Battery Status

Yesterday, I wrote about the problems I had with Emacs when I updated to OS X Mavericks. The problem was that the call to display-battery-mode failed. For OS X, Emacs uses pmset to get the battery status data. With Maverics, … Continue reading

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Mavericks and Battery Status

I just upgraded my iMac and MacBook Pro to the new OS X, Mavericks. The upgrade went flawlessly—everything should work as well—and my iMac came up without a problem. I spend most of my time in Emacs, of course, so … Continue reading

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The Aaron Swartz Legacy

I’ve written before about Aaron Swartz’s last project, software to enable whistle blowers to communicate with news organizations anonymously. The New Yorker was the first to implement the system. Those with information about government misdeeds finally had a secure way … Continue reading

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List of Free Programming Books

Victor Felder has an excellent list of free programming books over at Github. The list is indexed in several ways so it’s pretty easy to find books in the area you’re interested in. Among other things, I learned that there … Continue reading

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