Author Archives: jcs

Comments Temporarily Turned Off

Posted on 2014-02-06 by jcs

I’m temporarily turning off comments. I’ll explain further tomorrow and, with any luck, have them turned back on by the end of Friday. Until then, please bear with me.

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A Lisp Overview

Posted on 2014-02-06 by jcs

A few days ago I wrote about Simon Tatham’s overview of C. Today, I want to mention a very nice overview of Lisp. The overview is really a Lisp primer aimed at C/C++/Java programmers (it’s notes from the CSC330 course … Continue reading →

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Less Familiar Lisp Functions

Posted on 2014-02-05 by jcs

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Christopher Neufeld’s series on the less familiar parts of Common Lisp. He’s up to the Fs now so if you’re interested in Lisp, you should check in with his latest posts. One … Continue reading →

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The Fate of Cursive in Florida

Posted on 2014-02-04 by jcs

As long time readers know, I have a continuing interest in the state of cursive handwriting. See here, here, here, here, and here for some of my thoughts on the matter. One of the continuing threads in those posts is … Continue reading →

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More Peeks at Emacs 24.4

Posted on 2014-02-03 by jcs

Over at Emacs Redux, the ever informative Bozhidar Batsov has a couple more posts up in his series on the upcoming Emacs 24.4 release. The first concerns new string manipulation functions. It’s odd that Emacs has been historically deficient in … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.15 Released

Posted on 2014-02-02 by jcs

Steel-Bank Common Lisp 1.1.15 just got released. As usual, it built and installed without incident on both my Macs. This release brings a new register allocation algorithm, some optimizations that increase the speed of make-array under certain circumstances, some enhancements, … Continue reading →

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The Dangers of the Digital Life

Posted on 2014-02-01 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I’ve embraced the digital life and pretty much given up dealing with paper, pens, and all the rest of the traditional record keeping methods. Almost everything happens on-line and whatever paper documents I get are … Continue reading →

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OS Security Appraisals

Posted on 2014-01-31 by jcs

The United Kingdom’s CESG has published an appraisal the security of various operating systems. The TL;DR is that Ubuntu Linux is the “most secure” but Ubuntu is probably a proxy for Linux (no other Linux distros were profiled). Happily, the … Continue reading →

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An Overview of C

Posted on 2014-01-30 by jcs

I spent so many years writing C code that I still tend to “think” in C when considering an algorithm. That’s true even when, as is mostly the case now, I’m going to write the algorithm in Lisp. A lot … Continue reading →

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Not Just Illegal, Criminal

Posted on 2014-01-29 by jcs

Back in August, I wrote a post about Jennifer Granick’s outstanding article, My Dinner With NSA Director Keith Alexander, that appeared in Forbes. Now Granick is back with another great article that discusses the recent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight … Continue reading →

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