Author Archives: jcs

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

What We Really Mean

Posted on 2015-09-27 by jcs

Like all great humor, it’s funny because it’s so true: Every time a developer says "temporary workaround" I remember this list. pic.twitter.com/OpI48BvJxo — Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) September 4, 2015

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Still Not Paranoid?

Posted on 2015-09-27 by jcs

Perhaps this will help. Remember yesterday when I wrote about the MI5’s Andrew Parker assuring us that “MI5 is not about “browsing the lives” of the public? Here’s what they do when they think no one’s watching: The Intercept reports … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Turing Complete Documents

Posted on 2015-09-26 by jcs

I thought this was pretty funny until I realized it applies to my beloved Org mode too. Why is it that the first thing we do after developing a new document format is to make it Turing-complete? Seriously what is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 2 Comments