Author Archives: jcs

Lenovo Again

Posted on 2015-08-16 by jcs

Remember all those apologies from Lenovo after their stealth installation of the SuperFish adware was revealed? Apparently they didn’t really mean them. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Unless … Continue reading →

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A Word to the Wise

Posted on 2015-08-15 by jcs

Advertisers: clean up your act or look forward to a future like this Ad exec in 2000: Annoying ads perform better. in 2010: Ads based on tracking users perform better. in 2017: Why are all our ads blocked? — Brian Smith (@BRIAN_____) … Continue reading →

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Where Work Goes to Die

Posted on 2015-08-15 by jcs

Swizec Teller has an amusing article in DZone on Why Offices Are Where Work Goes to Die. The article is, as I say, amusing but it also mines several nuggets of truth. Irreal, as you doubtless know to your sorrow, … Continue reading →

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The No Irony Zone

Posted on 2015-08-14 by jcs

@drkjam @fgunay1 pic.twitter.com/ZH486vRxzR — Orestis Bastounis (@MrBastounis) July 17, 2015

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Emacs as an OS

Posted on 2015-08-14 by jcs

Daniele Sluijters says: People make fun of #emacs calling it an OS, but why do you call #Xcode that's actually bigger than #osx an IDE? — Daniele Sluijters (@daenney) August 3, 2015 He has a point but I don’t think … Continue reading →

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Mickey on Flycheck

Posted on 2015-08-13 by jcs

If you’re a Flymake user, Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has some advice for you: switch to Flycheck. It’s a drop in replacement for Flymake that has better out-of-the-box language support and is faster. Mickey says that for him the … Continue reading →

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Diffing Regions in the Same File

Posted on 2015-08-12 by jcs

A Nice tip from Aaron Fischr: #emacs hint of the day: Compare two regions in a single file with M-x ediff-regions-wordwise — Aaron Fischr (@fu86) July 31, 2015 This works for relatively small regions. For larger regions (over 200 lines, … Continue reading →

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Oracle on Finding Exploits

Posted on 2015-08-12 by jcs

Via Matt Blaze: My first assumption after reading this was that Oracle's web server was hacked and this article is a parody. https://t.co/ODpT4L76TE — matt blaze (@mattblaze) August 11, 2015 Oracle’s Mary Ann Davidson wrote an astoundingly foolish and arrogant … Continue reading →

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Yasnippets Tutorial

Posted on 2015-08-11 by jcs

Lefteris Karapetsas has an interesting tutorial on using yasnippets for entering boilerplate code. A lot of us use small snippets for minor tasks such as filling in a for or while loop. Karapetsas shows how to use it for large … Continue reading →

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The Origin of STDERR

Posted on 2015-08-10 by jcs

Most (all?) modern operating systems have the notion of STDERR, a separate output channel that programs can use to output error messages. It’s especially important for Operating Systems that have some notion of “pipe” where the output of one program … Continue reading →

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