Author Archives: jcs

SBCL 1.1.13

Posted on 2013-11-07 by jcs

I forgot to mention that SBCL 1.1.13 is out and ready for download. There are some bug fixes, a few minor enhancements, and a couple of optimizations for SXHASH. You can check the release notes to see exactly what’s changed. … Continue reading →

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NSA Recap

Posted on 2013-11-06 by jcs

The Guardian, which has done almost all the heavy lifting on the ongoing NSA story, has an excellent recapitulation of the story so far and what it means for us. The page is interactive and has snippets of video interviews … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Magnar Sveen

Posted on 2013-11-05 by jcs

Sacha Chua continues her series of chats with Emacs luminaries by interviewing Magnar Sveen. Sveen, of course, is the producer of the highly regarded Emacs Rocks! videos as well as the author of such Emacs packages as Expand Region, Multiple … Continue reading →

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From the Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Posted on 2013-11-04 by jcs

How could they think this was acceptable?

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Real Time Internet Monitoring

Posted on 2013-11-03 by jcs

If you’re like me, you probably enjoyed the spectacle of Tom Matzzie live-tweeting an overheard off-the-record conversation between Ex NSA Director Michael Hayden and a reporter. The hilarity was terminated when a colleague of Hayden called him to warn of … Continue reading →

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The Third Way

Posted on 2013-11-02 by jcs

If you’ve been paying attention lately you’ve probably noticed the raging dispute concerning how many spaces are appropriate at the end of a sentence. If you learned to type on an actual typewriter you were taught the hard and fast … Continue reading →

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Full Screen Magit Status

Posted on 2013-11-01 by jcs

Ever since he posted it last December, I’ve been a huge fan of Magnar Sveen’s hack to display magit-status in full screen and then restore the previous window configuration upon quitting. It’s nice because you can commit a file and … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp Features

Posted on 2013-10-31 by jcs

A couple of years ago, Lisp luminary Nikodemus Siivola rescued and reposted Abhishek Reddy’s Features of Common Lisp page. It serves as a nice introduction to what makes Common Lisp such a great development environment. It doesn’t, of course, cover … Continue reading →

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Building Password Lists

Posted on 2013-10-30 by jcs

A little while ago Ars Technica published an interesting article on how password crackers build their lists of trial passwords. The TL;DR is that they scan Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, news websites, song lyrics, IRC logs, Twitter, and other sources of … Continue reading →

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Running Ping in Emacs

Posted on 2013-10-29 by jcs

Last year I wrote about my delight in discoverying the Emacs Net Utilities. It’s nice to be able to run a quick ping, traceroute, or even some of the other network utilities right from Emacs. I’ve found, however, that there … Continue reading →

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