Author Archives: jcs

Reproducible Research Redux

Posted on 2013-07-09 by jcs

Longtime readers know that I’m a big fan of reproducible research and, specifically, the way that Emacs and Org mode help make it possible. Here’s a very nice video presentation from SciPy2013 by John Kitchin. He describes how he writes … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Locate and Emacs

Posted on 2013-07-08 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at the excellent Emacs Redux tells us something that I didn’t know: It’s possible to call locate from Emacs. For those of you without a Unix background, locate is a utility that will return a list of … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 4 Comments

Perfect Forward Secrecy

Posted on 2013-07-07 by jcs

If, like me, you’re unsettled by the recent government(s) snooping you are probably looking for ways to secure your on-line activities. One obvious way is to use SSL/TLS whenever possible. If you use Firefox or Chrome, HTTPS Everywhere can help. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Take Your Lockdown and …

Posted on 2013-07-06 by jcs

For those of you still mourning the demise of Google Reader there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that, as usual, Netizens have stepped in and provided alternatives. I’m using Feedly and am happy with it but … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Snail Mail Too

Posted on 2013-07-05 by jcs

Here’s another reason, if you needed one, to forego snail mail. Forget the latency and cost; it turns out that the USPS takes pictures of both sides of every envelope they process. This is analogous to the NSA’s wholesale collection … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Multiparadigm Elisp

Posted on 2013-07-04 by jcs

I got a pointer to an interesting Wilfred Hughes post from this Magnar Sveen tweet. The post, Adventures in Multi Paradigm Programming, looks at the power and flexibility of Emacs Lisp. One often hears how Elisp is a crappy language … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Reprieve

Posted on 2013-07-03 by jcs

If you were a Google Reader user and neglected to retrieve your subscription data from Google, there’s a reprieve of sorts. Although Google Reader is no longer operating, Google is keeping your Reader data available until 2013-07-15. After that it’s … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Phoneme

Posted on 2013-07-02 by jcs

It’s a good bet that most geeks have a gmail account. I use mine mostly for mailing lists but many use it as their main email account and consequently are apt to have sensitive data in their saved emails. If … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Byte Compiling Elisp

Posted on 2013-07-01 by jcs

I used to obsess about byte compiling my Elisp files but then I realized that The only thing I ever byte compiled was my init.el and updates to the packages I load. Byte compiling your startup file makes no appreciable … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 1 Comment

Feedly

Posted on 2013-06-30 by jcs

Google Reader is going away on Monday. That means that Reeder, my RSS reader of choice, is going to stop working. So far, only the Reeder iPhone app has been updated. That’s useless to me because the iPhone screen is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 3 Comments