Author Archives: jcs

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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Git Stash

Posted on 2014-02-28 by jcs

Over at softwarecave there’s a nice post on using git stash. In git, the stash is basically a stack on which you can push your current changes while you so something else. Maybe you want to change branches without committing … Continue reading →

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Variable Pitch Mode

Posted on 2014-02-27 by jcs

Today I ran across a tweet that recommends the use of variable-pitch-mode when writing prose instead of code: #emacs tip: when writing prose instead of code toggle M-x variable-pitch-mode for proportional fonts. It's amazing how much it helps. — The … Continue reading →

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Open Space Offices (Again)

Posted on 2014-02-26 by jcs

Nathan, over at thoughts from the red planet, blogs about The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies. I’ve long been puzzled about this myself and have written about it before, most recently in my The Insanity of … Continue reading →

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