Author Archives: jcs

Can We Please Keep Our Eye On The Ball

Posted on 2013-06-27 by jcs

Careful Irreal readers will have detected that I’m not much of a fan of the Press. Yes, yes, a free press is vital to a free and democratic society and all that. I just wish they’d do a better job. … Continue reading →

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Tasker

Posted on 2013-06-26 by jcs

As most of you know, I live in the Apple ecosystem so I was a bit jealous when I read this post by Ben Simon. Simon has an Android phone and therefore has access to the excellent Tasker app. One … Continue reading →

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An Elisp Mystery

Posted on 2013-06-25 by jcs

Over at the Emacs Reddit, wadcann posts a nice idea. The problem is to have abbreviations that touch their surrounding text. The canonical example is punctuation like the em-dash: Many national security professionals—those in the CIA, NSA, and similar… You … Continue reading →

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Keeping Your Data Safe From the NSA

Posted on 2013-06-24 by jcs

After another week of seemingly never ending revelations about government snooping into our phone calls and Web activities—you guys in Europe can stop snickering; you aren’t immune either—many of us are wondering how we can regain a modicum of privacy. … Continue reading →

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Speculative Problems

Posted on 2013-06-23 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis tweeted the perfect answer to those who complain about “problems” with Lisp syntax. The tweet was apparently provoked by this post from John Cook that, while discussing symbols in programming languages, remarked that “Lisp’s typographical monotony makes it … Continue reading →

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Lisp Hackers

Posted on 2013-06-22 by jcs

For some time Vsevolod Dyomkin has been running interviews with Lisp hackers on his blog, Lisp, The Universe and Everything. Irreal has featured many of these in the past. Now Dyomkin has gathered those interviews and assembled them into a … Continue reading →

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My Solution to the Last Elisp Challenge

Posted on 2013-06-21 by jcs

The challenge was to convert the output from dstat so that all the bytes values (some of which are given as kilobytes or megabytes) to just bytes. Thus, 2k would become 2048 and 3M would become 3145728. Similarly, dstat outputs … Continue reading →

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The Hipsters and the Designer

Posted on 2013-06-20 by jcs

Editorial note: I wrote this a few weeks ago (before WWDC) but didn’t publish it because it seemed a bit ranty. Now Apple has revealed iOS 7 and its icons and the hipsters are still yak yak yaking about them. … Continue reading →

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Quickutil

Posted on 2013-06-19 by jcs

Robert Smith and Eitarow Fukamachi have started a really interesting new project: Quickutil. The idea is to do for small Lisp utilities what Quicklisp does for Lisp libraries. Smith explains it all on his SYMBO1ICS IDEAS blog but the TL;DR … Continue reading →

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European Lisp Symposium

Posted on 2013-06-18 by jcs

Here are links to the talks from the European Lisp Symposium from this June. There were some technical problems but most of the talks were captured. These are audio links and in some cases the accompanying slides (as PDFs). If … Continue reading →

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