Author Archives: jcs

An Emacs Lisp Based Common Lisp

Posted on 2014-04-17 by jcs

Lars Brinkhoff has a really interesting project up at GitHub. It’s emacs-cl, a Common Lisp implemented in Emacs Lisp. This probably isn’t all that useful but it sure is awesome. As far as I can tell, it’s a pretty complete. … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.4 Pretest

Posted on 2014-04-16 by jcs

The first pretest of Emacs 24.4, Emacs 24.3.90, is available via FTP at the GNU Emacs archive. This the first of an expected 6 or so pretest releases leading up to Emacs 24.4. The Emacs devs are now in bug … Continue reading →

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Handling Password Fields

Posted on 2014-04-15 by jcs

With the advent of the heartbleed debacle you’ve probably spent a bunch of time changing your passwords. I know I have. Having to update several passwords has opened an old wound: the really really stupid policies and coding behind password … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Tom Marble

Posted on 2014-04-14 by jcs

Sacha Chua has posted another interesting episode in her series of video chats with Emacs users. This time it’s with Tom Marble who talks about and demonstrates his Emacs-based invoicing system. Marble is a consultant and wrote the system to … Continue reading →

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The NSA and Heartbleed

Posted on 2014-04-13 by jcs

Bloomberg is reporting that the NSA knew about and exploited the heartbleed bug for years. The NSA is, of course, denying that but if you’ve been keeping score it’s pretty easy to figure out who to believe. If it’s true … Continue reading →

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Mickey on Running Shell Commands with Dired

Posted on 2014-04-12 by jcs

The essential Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has another post in his series on dired. This time it’s about running shell commands on multiple files from within Emacs. If you’re a Unix user and used to using find and xargs … Continue reading →

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Latency

Posted on 2014-04-11 by jcs

Every programmer understands, at least in a general way, the relative latency of various computer operations. For example, we all know that accessing a value from a CPU register is faster than accessing that value from an L1 cache is … Continue reading →

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Working Through SICP

Posted on 2014-04-10 by jcs

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a huge fan of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), Hal Abelson’s and Jerry Sussman’s seminal work on computer science. It’s a tremendous resource and one that’s available on the Web … Continue reading →

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Another GnuPG Tutorial

Posted on 2014-04-09 by jcs

I’ve written many times about GnuPG and other programs that support the OpenPGP standard (the last time here). I really, really wish that everyone would start using it. That would certainly put a crimp in the NSA’s operations. Over at … Continue reading →

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Left Turns

Posted on 2014-04-08 by jcs

Do you avoid left turns when you’re driving? I do. I’ll take different routes to destinations that are across the street from each other to avoid making a left-hand turn against traffic if the destination street has more than light … Continue reading →

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