Author Archives: jcs

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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Emacs Idioms

Posted on 2014-09-30 by jcs

Learning to configure and extend Emacs is pretty easy for those with a modicum of Lisp experience. Much has been written about the shortcomings of Elisp and while those criticisms have merit, it’s easy for a Lisper to become comfortable … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.4 Released

Posted on 2014-09-29 by jcs

Steel Bank Common Lisp 1.2.4 has been released and is available at the usual place. Check the NEWS page for what’s new in this release (mostly some improvements in how certain sequence functions are implemented). As usual, there were no … Continue reading →

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Wilfred Hughes on Macro Systems

Posted on 2014-09-28 by jcs

Wilfred Hughes has an interesting post, Comparitive Macrology, in which he looks at the macro systems of various languages. For each, he implements two macros: A swap macro to exercise hygiene An anaphoric macro to exercise (intentional) variable capture He … Continue reading →

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BSD Unix Repository

Posted on 2014-09-27 by jcs

As I’ve written before, I believe that one of the best ways of becoming a master programmer is to study the work of the masters. One of the best sources for this that I know of is the BSD Unix … Continue reading →

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