Author Archives: jcs

NIST and Keccak

Posted on 2013-10-19 by jcs

I’m a bit of a crypto nerd—though far from a practitioner or expert—so I’m on NIST‘s SHA-3 mailing list. The mailing list’s main purpose was to keep the contestant teams and other interested observers up to date on the competition. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Rocks at WebRebels 3

Posted on 2013-10-18 by jcs

Magnar Sveen has posted the third part of his cleaned up WebRebels talk. This section demonstrates some Javascript refactoring. It’s only 58 seconds long so you won’t have to map out a block of time to watch.

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WDIRED

Posted on 2013-10-17 by jcs

Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has a nice post on wdired. Dired is an underappreciated part of Emacs but even many who use it don’t realize that you can edit file names, permissions, and owner/group directly in the dired buffer … Continue reading →

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Word

Posted on 2013-10-16 by jcs

Over at Charlie’s Diary, Charlie Stross has an excellent rant entitled Why Microsoft Word Must Die. I’ve written previously of my own feelings about Word: hatred bordering on the pathological. I consider it the apotheosis of everything that can be … Continue reading →

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Magit Stage All Changes

Posted on 2013-10-15 by jcs

As I’ve mentioned previously, I keep my blog posts—all my work, really—in a git repository. I manage the repositories with magit. If you aren’t a magit user, you’re really missing out and should take a look. When I publish a … Continue reading →

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Using yasnippet to Reduce Blogging Friction

Posted on 2013-10-14 by jcs

Every Irreal blog post begins with some header information that tells org2blog the title, category, and tags for the post. These get communicated to WordPress when org2blog exports the post. Those lines look like this: #+TITLE: Using =yasnippet= to Reduce … Continue reading →

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Air Gaps

Posted on 2013-10-13 by jcs

Bruce Schneier has an interesting post on setting up an air gap computer. It seems simple: just never connect your computer to the Internet. The problem is a completely isolated computer isn’t much use unless all you want to do … Continue reading →

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The Lavabit Story

Posted on 2013-10-12 by jcs

The New Yorker has a nice article on the Lavabit back story and current status. It recounts the details of the negotiations between Lavabit and the government. It’s pretty clear that the government was disingenuous about their demands. Armed with … Continue reading →

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Terror of the Demo

Posted on 2013-10-11 by jcs

I’ve given my fair share of demos as I’m sure many of you have. If you’re anything like me, you were lucky if the worst thing you suffered was butterflies in your stomach. But all that was nothing compared to … Continue reading →

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Emacs Rocks Does WebRebels

Posted on 2013-10-10 by jcs

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the posting of Magnar Sveen’s WebRebels video. It’s finally up but sadly the projection of his computer screen is unreadable even when blown up to full screen. That’s a great disappointment. Of course, Sveen knows a … Continue reading →

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