Author Archives: jcs

SBCL 1.2.16

Posted on 2015-10-06 by jcs

SBCL 1.2.16 has been released and is ready for download at the usual place. This month’s update has one enhancement involving timers and 3 bug fixes. You can read the details on the NEWS page. As usual, I compiled the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sacha’s Guide to Managing Tasks with Org Mode

Posted on 2015-10-05 by jcs

The ever awesome Sacha Chua has an excellent Baby Steps Guide to Managing Your Tasks with Org. It’s still a work in progress but even in its unfinished state it’s a really useful guide for getting started with Org mode. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Ruining the Internet

Posted on 2015-10-04 by jcs

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has a post on how adtech is ruining the Internet. He points to an article on Bloomberg that makes the case for how disastrous adtech is for advertisers. When I followed the link, Bloomberg … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

We Have to Outlaw Gloves

Posted on 2015-10-03 by jcs

A nice followup to Blaze’s tweet that encryption was a problem in only four cases last year. I'll bet burglars wore gloves to avoid leaving fingerprint evidence a lot more than four times last year. Time for a war on … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Happy Birthday: Free at Last

Posted on 2015-10-03 by jcs

It’s long been obvious to anyone who took a serious look that the claimed copyrights on “Happy Birthday” are invalid. That hasn’t stopped Warner Music from extorting user fees on the order of two million dollars a year, though. Now, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Nifty Example of Metaprogramming

Posted on 2015-10-02 by jcs

Some of the most enjoyable programming I do is metaprogramming: writing code that writes code. Lisp macros are all about that, of course, but the idea is much more general. Often times the code that the code writes is just … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Org Basics IV

Posted on 2015-10-01 by jcs

Ben Maughan has posted the fourth episode in his Org Mode Basics series. This time he talks about formatting the text in Org buffers and adding executable source code blocks to your Org file. The Org markup language is very … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Lenovo Yet Again

Posted on 2015-09-30 by jcs

From Irreal’s You Can’t Make This Stuff Up department we have news of Lenovo once again secreting malware on their computers. This time it’s on the top-of-the-line Thinkpad model widely assumed to be immune from this nonsense. I know lots … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Cory Doctorow on Ad Blocking

Posted on 2015-09-29 by jcs

Over at The Guardian, Cory Doctorow has an excellent article on ad blocking and the future of Internet advertising. He makes a point that I haven’t seen before: it’s only a matter of time until one of the big data … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Seven Years of Reproducible Research

Posted on 2015-09-28 by jcs

Christophe Pouzat has posted the slides from his talk Seven Years of Reproducible Research: From R / Sweave to Org. As the title suggests, the talk covers Pouzat’s evolution from using R and Sweave for reproducible research to using Org … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 1 Comment