Monthly Archives: January 2014

When Your git Server Dies

Posted on 2014-01-11 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I use git to keep my two main machines in sync. The other day the linux server that I kept the repositories on died. I had turned it off for a few seconds to deal … Continue reading →

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Unicode Representation in Emacs Strings

Posted on 2014-01-10 by jcs

Xah Lee posted a useful fact that I’m sure I knew but had forgotten or at least not internalized. The tip is how to encode unicode in Emacs strings. Given that Emacs supports Unicode and, indeed, uses UTF-8 as its … Continue reading →

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Optimizing Lisp

Posted on 2014-01-09 by jcs

Over at the Lisp Subreddit, they have a pointer to an interesting 2006 paper on How to make Lisp go faster than C by Didier Verna. One of the persistent myths about Lisp is that it’s slow. That comes from … Continue reading →

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Before There Was Snowden

Posted on 2014-01-08 by jcs

The New York Times has an absolutely fascinating story about a 43 year old crime that was, until recently, unsolved. It’s a story that shows there is nothing new under the sun. It’s also a story intrinsically involved with the … Continue reading →

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Slime Moving to Github

Posted on 2014-01-07 by jcs

Xach is reporting that Slime is moving to Github. That’s great news but mostly it’s good news for Xach who no longer has to deal with CVS to get the latest version of Slime for Quicklisp. For the rest of … Continue reading →

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How To Reallocate Memory

Posted on 2014-01-06 by jcs

Chris Taylor has a nice post on reallocating arrays. The problem is a common one: you initially allocate an array (or other data structure) and later want to make it larger. In C, for example, you would use the realloc … Continue reading →

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FIDO

Posted on 2014-01-05 by jcs

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has joined the FIDO alliance. The FIDO, Fast IDentity Online, alliance is an industry group that is developing protocols to replace the passwords for access to Web sites. The idea is to use public … Continue reading →

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Serializable Emacs Objects

Posted on 2014-01-04 by jcs

Christopher Wellons over at null program has a very nice post on readable closures in Emacs. With the introduction of lexical scoping and, consequently, closures in Emacs 24 it’s nice to discover that Elisp closures are readable. That is, you … Continue reading →

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The Sins of the Technical Press

Posted on 2014-01-03 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m inclined to a jaundiced view of the press. They are, far too often, biased and lazy and write stories that aren’t simply wrong but the opposite of the truth. The late Michael Crichton famously described … Continue reading →

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Popup Windows in Emacs

Posted on 2014-01-02 by jcs

Kris Jenkins has a nice post on using the popup package to pop up help windows in Emacs. He shows a tiny amount of Elisp that pops up the system help for the symbol at point. It would be easy … Continue reading →

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