Author Archives: jcs

Judge Rules Against the TSA

Posted on 2014-01-18 by jcs

Back in December, I wrote about the government’s dubious tactics aimed at preventing a woman placed on the no-fly from getting a fair trial on the matter. Because the woman is not a U.S. citizen, the government attempted to keep … Continue reading →

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Emacs Index Searching

Posted on 2014-01-17 by jcs

Xah Lee has a blog post (2014-01-16) that reminded me of two useful functions that I can never seem to remember: emacs-index-search and elisp-index-search. They allow you to look up a topic in the Emacs or Elisp manuals by querying … Continue reading →

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Schneier on the NSA Threat

Posted on 2014-01-16 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about how there is little evidence that the NSA’s mass surveillance is effective. Bruce Schneier has an interesting article up that argues it’s worse than that. Schneier says that the NSA is a threat to our security. … Continue reading →

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The Usefulness of Mass Surveillance

Posted on 2014-01-15 by jcs

Remember those 50 plus terrorist plots that the NSA mass surveillance was instrumental in stopping? You won’t be surprised to learn that that was yet another lie. Ars Technica is reporting on a New America Foundation study that examined 225 … Continue reading →

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Emacs Byte Code

Posted on 2014-01-14 by jcs

Over at null program, Christopher Wellons has an excellent post on Emacs Byte Code Internals. Most people won’t care, of course, but we’re nerds and we don’t like black boxes. As Wellons says, the byte code internals are under documented—or … Continue reading →

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Emacs Colors with OS X

Posted on 2014-01-13 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has his third post on the features of the coming Emacs 24.4 up. This time, he discusses the addition of sRGB to the NextStep (NS) build section of Emacs. The NS build section is where all the Mac … Continue reading →

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Know Lisp, Get a Job?

Posted on 2014-01-12 by jcs

Over at the Lisp subreddit, nhs111throwaway asks if anyone actually got a job because they know Lisp. The problem with a question like that is that you’re going to get only anecdotal information as answers. Still, it’s interesting to read … Continue reading →

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When Your git Server Dies

Posted on 2014-01-11 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I use git to keep my two main machines in sync. The other day the linux server that I kept the repositories on died. I had turned it off for a few seconds to deal … Continue reading →

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Unicode Representation in Emacs Strings

Posted on 2014-01-10 by jcs

Xah Lee posted a useful fact that I’m sure I knew but had forgotten or at least not internalized. The tip is how to encode unicode in Emacs strings. Given that Emacs supports Unicode and, indeed, uses UTF-8 as its … Continue reading →

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Optimizing Lisp

Posted on 2014-01-09 by jcs

Over at the Lisp Subreddit, they have a pointer to an interesting 2006 paper on How to make Lisp go faster than C by Didier Verna. One of the persistent myths about Lisp is that it’s slow. That comes from … Continue reading →

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