Monthly Archives: June 2014

The Last Line Effect

Posted on 2014-06-15 by jcs

Andrey Karpov has an interesting post that explores a surprising conclusion. Karpov studies errors in computer code professionally for his company Viva64. The company makes the static code analysers PVS-Studio and CppCat. Karpov studies different code bases and writes about … Continue reading →

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The Unix Repository Project

Posted on 2014-06-14 by jcs

I’m a big believer in the notion that one of the best ways to become a master programmer is to study the code of those who already are. There was a time when that was a lot harder than it … Continue reading →

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Eshell and Abbreviations

Posted on 2014-06-13 by jcs

I’m a big fan of eshell and much prefer it to running Bash inside a terminal buffer. I like to run it full frame and wrote some code to automatically save my window configuration and then run eshell in the … Continue reading →

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ido Completions Buffer

Posted on 2014-06-12 by jcs

I just learned something that the rest of you probably already know. Sometimes when using ido you can get a long list of candidates. Scrolling through them can be a pain. That’s helped a bit by ido-vertical-mode, which I like … Continue reading →

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Troy Hunt on the Cobra Effect

Posted on 2014-06-11 by jcs

Troy Hunt comments on that incredibly silly tweet by British Gas explaining why they disable pasting into the password field on their site. I wrote about that here. Sadly, it turns out that this practice is more widespread than I … Continue reading →

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Emacs and Vi

Posted on 2014-06-10 by jcs

Mike Kozlowski has a thoughtful post on the lessons of Emacs and Vi(m). His thesis is that while the lessons of Emacs have largely been absorbed by those writing editors, those of Vi have not. Emacs versus Vi is one … Continue reading →

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Removing Repeated Occurrences of a Target Character From a String

Posted on 2014-06-09 by jcs

The Problem While I was going through my RSS feed the other day, I came across this Programming Praxis problem and thought right away that the solution called for a state machine. It’s one of those problems that seems easy … Continue reading →

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Pictures of NSA Corrupting New Networking Equipment

Posted on 2014-06-08 by jcs

We knew about the NSA’s intercepting network equipment and installing backdoor hardware before shipping it on to its intended destination. The idea, of course, was to enable easy access to networks that would otherwise hard to exploit. The NSA describes … Continue reading →

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The PhD Movie

Posted on 2014-06-07 by jcs

If you’ve been a graduate student since the late 1990’s, you’re probably familiar with PhD Comics, a comic drawn by Jorge Cham that captures the absurdities of his graduate studies in a way that will resonate with any graduate student. … Continue reading →

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Magnar Continues His WebRebels Videos

Posted on 2014-06-06 by jcs

The estimable Magnar Sveen has, to use his words, come out of hibernation and continued the posting of his WebRebels talk. This video is part 5 of the series. It’s been a while so if you don’t remember, the official … Continue reading →

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