Author Archives: jcs

Feeling Better

Posted on 2014-06-24 by jcs

I’m finally feeling a bit better and have started reading blogs and other sources again. I’m going to try to resume blogging now but don’t be surprised if things are spotty in the near future. There’s lots going on so … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | 6 Comments

Sick Leave

Posted on 2014-06-18 by jcs

For the last few days I’ve been flat on my back and unable to write new posts. It’s been all I could do to push queued up posts to Irreal. Rather than go on like that, I’m taking sick leave … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Email Self Defense Project

Posted on 2014-06-16 by jcs

The Free Software Foundation has a new project aimed at getting people to install and use email encryption software. They have published a guide and infographic that demonstrates in simple terms how (and why) to set up GnuPG and then … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 3 Comments

The Last Line Effect

Posted on 2014-06-15 by jcs

Andrey Karpov has an interesting post that explores a surprising conclusion. Karpov studies errors in computer code professionally for his company Viva64. The company makes the static code analysers PVS-Studio and CppCat. Karpov studies different code bases and writes about … Continue reading →

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The Unix Repository Project

Posted on 2014-06-14 by jcs

I’m a big believer in the notion that one of the best ways to become a master programmer is to study the code of those who already are. There was a time when that was a lot harder than it … Continue reading →

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Eshell and Abbreviations

Posted on 2014-06-13 by jcs

I’m a big fan of eshell and much prefer it to running Bash inside a terminal buffer. I like to run it full frame and wrote some code to automatically save my window configuration and then run eshell in the … Continue reading →

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ido Completions Buffer

Posted on 2014-06-12 by jcs

I just learned something that the rest of you probably already know. Sometimes when using ido you can get a long list of candidates. Scrolling through them can be a pain. That’s helped a bit by ido-vertical-mode, which I like … Continue reading →

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Troy Hunt on the Cobra Effect

Posted on 2014-06-11 by jcs

Troy Hunt comments on that incredibly silly tweet by British Gas explaining why they disable pasting into the password field on their site. I wrote about that here. Sadly, it turns out that this practice is more widespread than I … Continue reading →

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Emacs and Vi

Posted on 2014-06-10 by jcs

Mike Kozlowski has a thoughtful post on the lessons of Emacs and Vi(m). His thesis is that while the lessons of Emacs have largely been absorbed by those writing editors, those of Vi have not. Emacs versus Vi is one … Continue reading →

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Removing Repeated Occurrences of a Target Character From a String

Posted on 2014-06-09 by jcs

The Problem While I was going through my RSS feed the other day, I came across this Programming Praxis problem and thought right away that the solution called for a state machine. It’s one of those problems that seems easy … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 2 Comments