Author Archives: jcs

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 →

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Pictures of NSA Corrupting New Networking Equipment

Posted on 2014-06-08 by jcs

We knew about the NSA’s intercepting network equipment and installing backdoor hardware before shipping it on to its intended destination. The idea, of course, was to enable easy access to networks that would otherwise hard to exploit. The NSA describes … Continue reading →

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The PhD Movie

Posted on 2014-06-07 by jcs

If you’ve been a graduate student since the late 1990’s, you’re probably familiar with PhD Comics, a comic drawn by Jorge Cham that captures the absurdities of his graduate studies in a way that will resonate with any graduate student. … Continue reading →

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Magnar Continues His WebRebels Videos

Posted on 2014-06-06 by jcs

The estimable Magnar Sveen has, to use his words, come out of hibernation and continued the posting of his WebRebels talk. This video is part 5 of the series. It’s been a while so if you don’t remember, the official … Continue reading →

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Mutable String and Emacs Buffer Passing Style

Posted on 2014-06-05 by jcs

Speaking of Christopher Wellons, he’s got a very interesting post over at null program on mutable strings and Emacs buffer passing style. Wellons starts by pointing out that strings in Emacs Lisp, like many other languages, have a fixed size … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Christopher Wellons

Posted on 2014-06-04 by jcs

The invaluable Sacha Chua has posted another in her series of Emacs chats. This time it’s with Christopher Wellons. As regular readers know, I’m an admirer of Wellons and have written about him several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). … Continue reading →

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Grant Rettke’s Take on Narrowing to Multiple Regions

Posted on 2014-06-03 by jcs

Grant Rettke has his own take on a function to enable narrowing to multiple regions of a buffer. I learned about the idea from comments to a post on another matter and wrote about it here. Rettke takes the example … Continue reading →

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Turning On Undo in a Temporary Buffer

Posted on 2014-06-02 by jcs

Today I learned something new from a short post on Xah Lee’s blog. The idea is that you’ve written a command that generates output in a temporary buffer and you want to enable the undo function for the buffer so … Continue reading →

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