Author Archives: jcs

A Solution to EmacsGolf 4

Posted on 2013-05-08 by jcs

EmacsGolf 4 didn’t generate a lot of interest, apparently. What little discussion there was centered on why you would want to perform the given transformations rather than how to do so. Nevertheless, the honor of Emacs users everywhere is at … Continue reading →

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Lexical Binding in Emacs Video

Posted on 2013-05-07 by jcs

If you’re still confused about the difference between dynamic and lexical scoping in Emacs, Nic Ferrier has an excellent video that explains it with a couple of simple examples. You may find it useful to review the meaning of closure … Continue reading →

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Org Mode Summary

Posted on 2013-05-06 by jcs

I recently saw this Org-mode summary from the Linux Journal mentioned in a tweet. It’s pretty old—from 2007—but still serves as a useful introduction to some of Org-mode’s power. If you’ve never used Org-mode, this article will give you a … Continue reading →

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Complexity Cheat Sheet

Posted on 2013-05-05 by jcs

Eric Rowell and Nick Dizazzo have posted a great Big-O cheat sheet. The sheet gives time and space complexity for several popular algorithms such as searching, sorting, and manipulation of data structures and graphs. One feature that I like is … Continue reading →

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linedit

Posted on 2013-05-04 by jcs

Pavel Penev has updated and republished his excellent post Learning Lisp The Bump Free Way. It’s a nice introduction to the problems that Lisp n00bs face and how to overcome them. If you know anyone struggling with learning Lisp, this … Continue reading →

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DRM-Free Day

Posted on 2013-05-03 by jcs

Today is DRM-free day. To celebrate O’Reilly is offering 50% off on their entire ebook inventory1. I used the occasion to pick up a copy of Writing GNU Emacs Extensions. If you have any O’Reilly books on your “to purchase” … Continue reading →

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A Summary of New Libraries in April’s Quicklisp

Posted on 2013-05-03 by jcs

Ben Hyde has produced a summary of the new libraries in April’s Quicklisp distribution. Each item has a link to the library’s README so it’s easy to get a more detailed look at libraries that interest you. A very nice … Continue reading →

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EmacsMovies Looks at Gnus

Posted on 2013-05-02 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim has resumed his EmacsMovies series. This time it’s part 1 of a series on Gnus. Gnus is famously complex so Ibrahim’s taking the subject in smaller bites makes sense. As it is, the video is over 21 minutes … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.7 Released

Posted on 2013-05-01 by jcs

The folks at Steel Banks Common Lisp have released SBCL 1.1.7. As usual the build, test, and installation went without mishap. This month’s release is mainly bug fixes but also includes an enhancement to TRACE so that PRINT-ALL handles multiple-valued … Continue reading →

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Why Sites Have Bad Password Policies

Posted on 2013-04-30 by jcs

Ars Technica has an excellent article on why many sites have security limiting password policies. I’ve written about this before on my old blog, but the Ars Technica article is particularly infuriating. So much so that this is my second … Continue reading →

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