Author Archives: jcs

Sabotaging Your Competitors

Posted on 2016-05-16 by jcs

Charlie Stross was browsing through an old, recently declassified OSS manual on sabotaging the enemy’s production and started wondering about how you could apply the same principles to sabotage your competitors by injecting bad policies into their environment. He lists … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Culture | Leave a comment

Quitting with SIGUSR2

Posted on 2016-05-15 by jcs

The other day I wrote about using the SIGUSR2 signal to quit Emacs. It’s usually enough to unjam Emacs and get you into a state where you can at least save your work and restart Emacs. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

Tail Recursion in `gawk`

Posted on 2016-05-14 by jcs

Once you’ve used Lisp—especially Scheme—you come to regard tail recursion as a natural and necessary technique. Perhaps even a God given right. Sadly, leave the Lisp world and you’re pretty much out of luck. Of course, you can always make … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Tech, Unix | Leave a comment

Remote Shells with Tramp

Posted on 2016-05-13 by jcs

Howard Abrams has a nifty video on his setup for invoking remote shells. Those of you who have followed his recent videos know that he works with a lot of virtual machines and it is convenient for him to be … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

Email Paranoia

Posted on 2016-05-12 by jcs

If you’re paranoid about the security of your email or if you occasionally have the need to send secure messages to someone, the grugq, a well known and frequent commenter on security matters has a very nice gist on securing … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

Org Capture Template for Code Snippets

Posted on 2016-05-11 by jcs

Munen Alain M. Lafon has a nice post on using an Org capture template to record a bit of source code. I like it because it’s completely self-contained. You just define the template and it works. The real value of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs, Org-mode | 3 Comments

Chez Scheme Open Sourced

Posted on 2016-05-10 by jcs

Chez Scheme has always been an excellent Scheme implementation. It produces very fast object code and is a complete R6RS implementation with extensions. Chez Scheme was written by Kent Dybvig, who also wrote the excellent The SCHEME Programming Language (also … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Scheme | Leave a comment

Multiple Dispatch in CLOS

Posted on 2016-05-09 by jcs

Eli Bendersky has an outstanding post on multiple dispatch in Common Lisp. It’s part of a series he’s doing on multiple dispatch in various languages. Lisp has always looked at OOP differently from most languages and Lispers consider CLOS a … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Common-lisp, Lisp | 1 Comment

Learning Vim: Not That Hard

Posted on 2016-05-08 by jcs

As anyone who’s been around Irreal for awhile knows, I’m all in on Emacs. I find new uses for it and things I didn’t know it could do every day. Nonetheless, I was a Vim user for a long time … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs, Vim | 2 Comments

Password Cracking Times

Posted on 2016-05-07 by jcs

Over at Better Buys they have an interesting post on password cracking times. The post includes an interactive app that lets you estimate the cracking time for various passwords. They also include several examples that show how cracking time is … Continue reading →