Author Archives: jcs

You Can Trust Us

Posted on 2014-10-05 by jcs

When arguing that they be given some new extraordinary power, governments always say, “You can trust us not to abuse this power.” It always turns out to be a lie. Here, from Britain—a democratic country by any honest person’s definition—is … Continue reading →

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How to Have Fast Hyper, Super, and Meta Keys

Posted on 2014-10-04 by jcs

Via EmacsRocks: #Emacs, meet your new Hyper, Super, and Meta keys… pic.twitter.com/R85oGzbl80 — Jaime Fournier (@Jaime_Fournier) September 30, 2014 Seems a bit hardcore but if you’re a good touch typist and have a heavily customized Emacs, this may be just … Continue reading →

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Kernel Source

Posted on 2014-10-04 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about using the BSD Unix sources to learn from the masters. Even though I’ve read through most of those resources, I’m always on the lookout for more. Happily, I’ve come across another great resource, The … Continue reading →

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Final Pretest for Emacs 24.4

Posted on 2014-10-03 by jcs

Michael Fogleman gives us the heads up. RT: The last pretest of #emacs 24.4 was released today. Yuppie :) http://t.co/BfLdw1XTs1 . (via @liranzvibel) — Michael Fogleman (@mwfogleman) October 2, 2014 The long wait is almost over.

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Slightly Obscure Emacs Tips

Posted on 2014-10-03 by jcs

Xah Lee has updated his Emacs Less-known Tips page. It lists tips that Emacs n00bs may not be familiar with. Even more experienced Emacers may learn something new. Well worth a look, especially if you’re a beginner.

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A Nice Dired Tip

Posted on 2014-10-02 by jcs

Borkdude offers up a tip about Dired that I didn’t know: #emacs trick of the day: when you're "C-x-f"-ing through a path and halfway decide you want a dired buffer, just type C-d! — borkdude (@borkdude) October 1, 2014 You … Continue reading →

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Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Posted on 2014-10-02 by jcs

Sarah Laskow has a nice article in The Atlantic about the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. That’s an unlikely topic for the Atlantic, of course, but the article is more about Diffie and Hellman and how they changed everything with their protocol. … Continue reading →

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Recent Outage

Posted on 2014-10-01 by jcs

Irreal was offline for a few hours last night and early this morning. The problem was that spammers and their bots had been hitting the site so much that Irreal’s hosting provider suspended the site until we could get it … Continue reading →

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Generating Random Trees

Posted on 2014-10-01 by jcs

I’ve mentioned Atabey Kaygun’s blog before. He mostly writes short posts on some mathematical algorithm, which he illustrates with Lisp. One such post was about generating random trees of \(n\) nodes in such a way that every possible tree having … Continue reading →

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Automobiles and Apple

Posted on 2014-09-30 by jcs

For those who have been off-planet and haven’t heard the news, Apple’s iOS 8 encrypts the contents of users’ iPhone and iPads in such a way that only the user—not Apple—can access it. That means that Apple can no longer … Continue reading →

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