Monthly Archives: September 2014

The Real Purpose of Operating Systems

Posted on 2014-09-15 by jcs

An amusing anecdote from Perry Metzger’s The Editor of a Lifetime talk. I don't care what OS I use, it's just a boot loader for #Emacs anyway. –Some U. Penn PhD student — jandrusk (@jandrusk) August 21, 2014

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A Quick Introduction to Generic Functions & CLOS

Posted on 2014-09-14 by jcs

Zach Beane points to a nice post by Nicolas Hafner on Generic Functions and CLOS. CLOS is often considered a hideously complicated system but the basics are easy to understand and use and most people will never need to explore … Continue reading →

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And By the Way…

Posted on 2014-09-13 by jcs

…Happy Programmers’ Day.

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Things My Mom Taught Me

Posted on 2014-09-13 by jcs

Suppose a distant relative sends you a sweater. It’s a perfectly good sweater but not a style you like or would ever wear. Instead of rolling your eyes and sending a pro forma thank you note, you take to twitter … Continue reading →

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Mathematics in a Blog Post

Posted on 2014-09-12 by jcs

As some of you know, I was trained as a mathematician. It’s odd, then, that my posts don’t have more mathematics in them. The reason for that is that this blog is mostly about computers and development so there’s not … Continue reading →

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Shamir’s Secret Sharing Implementation

Posted on 2014-09-11 by jcs

Yesterday, I discussed Shamir’s secret sharing and how it works. The TL;DR was a method to give \(n\) people a secret number so that any \(k\) of the recipients \((k\lt n)\) can reveal the secret. The method works by defining … Continue reading →

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Shamir’s Secret Sharing

Posted on 2014-09-10 by jcs

References to Jeremy Kun’s The Mathematics of Secret Sharing keep popping up in my feed so it appears there’s some interest in it. The problem is to entrust shares in a secret to \(n\) people in such a way that … Continue reading →

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Tips on Being Productive with Emacs

Posted on 2014-09-09 by jcs

Back in 2009 Phil Sung taught a short course on being productive with Emacs. The slides from the course (1, 2) are still available and well worth a look. Often times, slides from a talk without the actual presentation aren’t … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Style Guide

Posted on 2014-09-08 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov, proprietor of Emacs Redux, is starting an interesting new project: The Emacs Lisp Style Guide. The idea is to create a community contributed set of rules for “good Elisp form.” Normally, I’d hate that sort of thing. Almost … Continue reading →

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Memory Reallocation Revisited

Posted on 2014-09-07 by jcs

Back in January I wrote about a charming result concerning how much memory should be increased when reallocating. Via Artur Malabarba, I came across a tweet by Wilfred Hughes Learnt a fascinating, non-obvious (to me) fact that resizing a vector's … Continue reading →

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