Author Archives: jcs

Emacs in a Year

Posted on 2014-08-04 by jcs

Chen Bin, who you may recognize from the Emacs and ErgoEmacs Google+ communities or from his blog, has an interesting essay on GitHub about how to master Emacs in a year. The essay is really the steps that Bin followed … Continue reading →

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The Logical Conclusion

Posted on 2014-08-03 by jcs

I’ve been writing, recently, about surveillance abuses in the United States. Just in case my European pals are imagining that this is an NSA problem that mainly concerns America with a few residual casualties in Europe, consider this logical conclusion … Continue reading →

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A Medal for Edward Snowden

Posted on 2014-08-03 by jcs

Jon Evans over at TechCrunch makes the case that America should give Edward Snowden a medal. To many, of course, that’s a non-starter; Snowden is the ultimate traitor doing his best to harm his country. Cooler heads, including Evans, are … Continue reading →

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Spying on the Senate

Posted on 2014-08-02 by jcs

Last March, I wrote about revelations that the CIA was spying on the U.S. Senate. At the time, CIA head John Brennan denied the allegation and heaped scorn on the very idea. Now, Brennan has admitted that, well yes, they … Continue reading →

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Programmers’ Fonts

Posted on 2014-08-01 by jcs

The other day I wrote about Emacs themes. It’s amazing how much difference a well chosen theme can make to your peace of mind and productivity. Just as important is the choice of a programming font. Fortunately, Emacs can support … Continue reading →

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DWIM Narrowing

Posted on 2014-07-31 by jcs

The other day I saw a nice bit of code from Michael Fogelman that implemented a “do what I mean narrowing” function. That seemed pretty neat and I made a mental note to add it to my init.el. Then Artur … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.2

Posted on 2014-07-30 by jcs

The latest version of Steel Bank Common Lisp is out and available at the usual place. The new version has some bug fixes and minor enhancements (see the NEWS page for details) so it represents the ongoing refinement of the … Continue reading →

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Emacs Autoloads

Posted on 2014-07-29 by jcs

Over at lunarsite, Sebastian Wiesner has a very nice post that explains the ins and outs of autoloads in Emacs lisp. Mostly, autoloads take care of themselves but sometimes users do need to interact with them. Here’s an example that … Continue reading →

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git-timemachine

Posted on 2014-07-28 by jcs

Recently, I’ve seen several references to the git-timemachine package. It didn’t seem that interesting to me so I ignored it. Then I noticed that Bozhidar Batsov is recommending it on Emacs Redux. When Batsov recommends something, it’s generally an indication … Continue reading →

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News on the Jewel v. NSA Case

Posted on 2014-07-27 by jcs

Here in the United States, the EFF is prosecuting a suit on the NSA’s indiscriminate collection of Americans’ private digital communications. In 2008 they filed the Jewel v. NSA case alleging that the NSA’s wholesale vacuuming up of Americans’ communications … Continue reading →

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