Author Archives: jcs

Before There Was Snowden

Posted on 2014-01-08 by jcs

The New York Times has an absolutely fascinating story about a 43 year old crime that was, until recently, unsolved. It’s a story that shows there is nothing new under the sun. It’s also a story intrinsically involved with the … Continue reading →

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Slime Moving to Github

Posted on 2014-01-07 by jcs

Xach is reporting that Slime is moving to Github. That’s great news but mostly it’s good news for Xach who no longer has to deal with CVS to get the latest version of Slime for Quicklisp. For the rest of … Continue reading →

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How To Reallocate Memory

Posted on 2014-01-06 by jcs

Chris Taylor has a nice post on reallocating arrays. The problem is a common one: you initially allocate an array (or other data structure) and later want to make it larger. In C, for example, you would use the realloc … Continue reading →

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FIDO

Posted on 2014-01-05 by jcs

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has joined the FIDO alliance. The FIDO, Fast IDentity Online, alliance is an industry group that is developing protocols to replace the passwords for access to Web sites. The idea is to use public … Continue reading →

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Serializable Emacs Objects

Posted on 2014-01-04 by jcs

Christopher Wellons over at null program has a very nice post on readable closures in Emacs. With the introduction of lexical scoping and, consequently, closures in Emacs 24 it’s nice to discover that Elisp closures are readable. That is, you … Continue reading →

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The Sins of the Technical Press

Posted on 2014-01-03 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m inclined to a jaundiced view of the press. They are, far too often, biased and lazy and write stories that aren’t simply wrong but the opposite of the truth. The late Michael Crichton famously described … Continue reading →

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Popup Windows in Emacs

Posted on 2014-01-02 by jcs

Kris Jenkins has a nice post on using the popup package to pop up help windows in Emacs. He shows a tiny amount of Elisp that pops up the system help for the symbol at point. It would be easy … Continue reading →

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Bozhidar Batsov on Emacs 24.4

Posted on 2014-01-01 by jcs

Over at Emacs Redux, Bozhidar Batsov is promising a peek at some of the Emacs 24.4 features. Because he contributed code to the release, he’s followed the development carefully and has been using it exclusively for the last six months … Continue reading →

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RTFM

Posted on 2013-12-31 by jcs

Some time ago1, I noticed that the Org footnote mechanism was not working correctly. As with similar footnote facilities, you add a footnote by marking where you want the footnote to appear in the text and then adding a paragraph … Continue reading →

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Mickey on Emacs 24.4

Posted on 2013-12-30 by jcs

As he has for the past several releases, Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has perused the NEWS file for the upcoming Emacs 24.4 and produced an informative post on what’s new. There are a couple of good reasons to read … Continue reading →

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