Author Archives: jcs

Me Neither

Posted on 2014-03-09 by jcs

Personally, I don't get the excitement surrounding #atomio, but I guess no editor can impress you after a decade spent in #Emacs. — Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) February 27, 2014

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Sauce for the Gander

Posted on 2014-03-08 by jcs

I don’t understand why they’re so upset. After all, if they have nothing to hide…

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Fixing the Emacs distnoted Problem on OS X 10.9

Posted on 2014-03-07 by jcs

With Emacs 24.3 (and possibly earlier versions) under OS X 10.9 there is a nasty problem that causes distnoted, the OS X distributed notifications daemon, to periodically suck up processor resources and basically tie up the machine. Sometimes it recovers … Continue reading →

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HTML as an STD?

Posted on 2014-03-06 by jcs

The LA Times has a surprising revelation about Americans’ beliefs. You might find their views extreme but are they wrong? As far as HTML is concerned, maybe they’re on to something. We geeks live in our own cocoon and sometimes … Continue reading →

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Dual_EC_DRBG Expalined

Posted on 2014-03-05 by jcs

Irreal readers are doubtless familiar with the broad outlines of the NSA’s insertion of a backdoor into the NIST Special Publication 800-90A elliptic curve random bit generator but may be unfamiliar about what was actually involved. Now Mother Jones has … Continue reading →

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Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Government to Collect Information About You

Posted on 2014-03-04 by jcs

This is why you shouldn’t trust the government to build databases about their citizens. At the link, Charlie Stross talks about the growing scandal in the UK concerning the NHS medical records of every citizen in the United Kingdom. Read … Continue reading →

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Outage

Posted on 2014-03-03 by jcs

And, we’re back. Sorry for the outage. Apparently my hosting provider had a series of drive failures that overwhelmed their RAID system. One of the servers affected runs the database for Irreal. My provider is very proactive and has been … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.16 Released

Posted on 2014-03-03 by jcs

The latest monthly release of Steel Bank Common Lisp is out. As usual, I had no problems building and installing the new release. You can download binaries or source at the usual place. After last month’s major enhancement of the … Continue reading →

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A Sunday Treat

Posted on 2014-03-02 by jcs

This really tickled me: This Man Invented A Machine To Remotely Electrocute Gullible Clickbait Readers. What Happens Next Will Shock You! — Josh Millard (@joshmillard) February 27, 2014 Oddly, I was all set to click but I couldn’t find a … Continue reading →

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Keys to the Internet

Posted on 2014-03-01 by jcs

The Guardian has an interesting story on the Seven People Who Hold the Keys to the Internet. Actually, there are 21 people but only 14 hold keys, the other seven hold code that can be used to recreate the key … Continue reading →

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