Author Archives: jcs

Emacs Byte Code

Posted on 2014-01-14 by jcs

Over at null program, Christopher Wellons has an excellent post on Emacs Byte Code Internals. Most people won’t care, of course, but we’re nerds and we don’t like black boxes. As Wellons says, the byte code internals are under documented—or … Continue reading →

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Emacs Colors with OS X

Posted on 2014-01-13 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has his third post on the features of the coming Emacs 24.4 up. This time, he discusses the addition of sRGB to the NextStep (NS) build section of Emacs. The NS build section is where all the Mac … Continue reading →

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Know Lisp, Get a Job?

Posted on 2014-01-12 by jcs

Over at the Lisp subreddit, nhs111throwaway asks if anyone actually got a job because they know Lisp. The problem with a question like that is that you’re going to get only anecdotal information as answers. Still, it’s interesting to read … Continue reading →

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When Your git Server Dies

Posted on 2014-01-11 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I use git to keep my two main machines in sync. The other day the linux server that I kept the repositories on died. I had turned it off for a few seconds to deal … Continue reading →

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Unicode Representation in Emacs Strings

Posted on 2014-01-10 by jcs

Xah Lee posted a useful fact that I’m sure I knew but had forgotten or at least not internalized. The tip is how to encode unicode in Emacs strings. Given that Emacs supports Unicode and, indeed, uses UTF-8 as its … Continue reading →

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Optimizing Lisp

Posted on 2014-01-09 by jcs

Over at the Lisp Subreddit, they have a pointer to an interesting 2006 paper on How to make Lisp go faster than C by Didier Verna. One of the persistent myths about Lisp is that it’s slow. That comes from … Continue reading →

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Before There Was Snowden

Posted on 2014-01-08 by jcs

The New York Times has an absolutely fascinating story about a 43 year old crime that was, until recently, unsolved. It’s a story that shows there is nothing new under the sun. It’s also a story intrinsically involved with the … Continue reading →

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Slime Moving to Github

Posted on 2014-01-07 by jcs

Xach is reporting that Slime is moving to Github. That’s great news but mostly it’s good news for Xach who no longer has to deal with CVS to get the latest version of Slime for Quicklisp. For the rest of … Continue reading →

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How To Reallocate Memory

Posted on 2014-01-06 by jcs

Chris Taylor has a nice post on reallocating arrays. The problem is a common one: you initially allocate an array (or other data structure) and later want to make it larger. In C, for example, you would use the realloc … Continue reading →

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FIDO

Posted on 2014-01-05 by jcs

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has joined the FIDO alliance. The FIDO, Fast IDentity Online, alliance is an industry group that is developing protocols to replace the passwords for access to Web sites. The idea is to use public … Continue reading →

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