Author Archives: jcs

SBCL 1.1.14 Is Out

Posted on 2013-12-05 by jcs

The excellent developers of Steel Bank Common Lisp have posted the latest release of the system. It compiled, passed the extended tests, and installed without issue on both my iMac and MacBook Pro. This release has a bunch of enhancements, … Continue reading →

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Working with Images in Emacs

Posted on 2013-12-04 by jcs

Over at Bytopia, Alex has a beautiful post on using Emacs to work with images. Alex is trying to train an OCR classifier to recognize characters from grocery store receipts. He started by scanning 4 or 5 receipts and breaking … Continue reading →

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House Members Press Boehner on NSA

Posted on 2013-12-03 by jcs

In a bit of good news, The Hill is reporting that U.S. House of Representatives members are pressing Speaker of the House John Boehner to allow a vote on reining in the NSA. If the members don’t get their vote, … Continue reading →

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Hyphenating Word Phrases

Posted on 2013-12-02 by jcs

Some word phrases should be hyphenated. For example, you should write “an end-to-end solution” rather than “end to end solution.”1 If you’re like me, you almost always forget about the hyphenation initially and just type “end to end” without stopping … Continue reading →

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A History of T

Posted on 2013-12-01 by jcs

I recently ran across a fascinating history of T, a Scheme-like Lisp dialect that preceded Common Lisp, over at Paul Graham’s blog. It was written by Olin Shivers who is well-known in the Scheme community and is the founding author … Continue reading →

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Ten Rules for Reproducible Research

Posted on 2013-11-30 by jcs

Those of you have been around for a while know I’m a big fan of reproducible research. I’ve written about it here, here, here, here, here, and here. Now Anton Nekrutenko, James Taylor, and Eivind Hovig have a nice article … Continue reading →

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Notes on the Sacha-Magnar Interview

Posted on 2013-11-29 by jcs

Sacha Chua has posted a followup to her interview with Magnar Sveen. It’s basically a set of topic headings that index into the video of the interview. That’s very nice because if you want to revisit a particular part of … Continue reading →

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A YASnippet Tutorial

Posted on 2013-11-28 by jcs

Matthew Keeler has posted a nice introduction to writing YASnippets. Keeler starts with a minimal snippet that simply includes the GPL 3 boiler plate in the file and then moves on to a for loop snippet for C/C++ that uses … Continue reading →

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Coping With the NSA Dragnet

Posted on 2013-11-27 by jcs

Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall, and Martin Heinrich have an interesting Op-ed in The New York Times entitled End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now. In it they say that they believe the NSA’s collection of telephone call metadata is a clear … Continue reading →

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More Site Tuning

Posted on 2013-11-26 by jcs

Since I tuned up the caching software for Irreal.org I’ve seen a significant improvement in download speeds. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen some problems with client-side caching. After I add a new post and reload the site, I see the previous … Continue reading →

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