Author Archives: jcs

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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Narrowing to Multiple Regions

Posted on 2014-04-07 by jcs

One of the joys of writing this blog is the things I learn from the comments. The other day, I wrote about fancy-narrow and that provoked an interesting discussion between Wilfred and Phil. Wilfred compared fancy-narrow to narrow-to-region-indirect. I assumed … Continue reading →

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The New Luddites Strike Again

Posted on 2014-04-06 by jcs

From time to time I take note of some particularly egregious example of stupidity from the new Luddites. The last time was here; see that post for links to the others. Today, we have another example in Judith Shulevitz’s article … Continue reading →

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NSA Admits to Warrantless Searches of Americans Phone Calls and Emails

Posted on 2014-04-05 by jcs

Surprise! It turns out that the NSA was looking at the phone calls and emails of Americans without a warrant after all. According The Guardian, James Clapper sent a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden admiting to the practice. What’s surprising … Continue reading →

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Getting Started With the Common Lisp Hyperspec

Posted on 2014-04-04 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis over at HexstreamSoft has a nice page about getting started with the Common Lisp Hyperspec. If you’re already familiar with the Hyperspec, you’re probably with most of the material. If you’re not, it’s a nice introduction. One thing … Continue reading →

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Ace-Link

Posted on 2014-04-03 by jcs

Oleh Krehel has a nifty new package that brings ace-jump-mode functionality to links in help and info buffers. The package, ace-link, makes following links easy by putting letters in front of each link. You follow the link by picking the … Continue reading →

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