Author Archives: jcs

Using Acme

Posted on 2012-11-08 by jcs

A while ago I wrote about Russ Cox’s Tour of the Acme Editor. Acme has a lot of great ideas. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Emacs. Where Emacs puts every conceivable functionality into the editor, Acme has … Continue reading →

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What We Need In An Editor

Posted on 2012-11-07 by jcs

Vivek Haldar has an interesting post in which he asks, essentially, what we need in an editor. He remarks that most people seem to want an editor that “looks good” and has certain performance and feature aspects that no one … Continue reading →

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Learning Elisp

Posted on 2012-11-06 by jcs

Xah Lee has an excellent post on learning how to program in Emacs Lisp1. His idea is to start with your favorite programming mode, disable it, and program your own. Begin with just doing syntax coloring and then slowly add … Continue reading →

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Apple’s Poisonous Touch?

Posted on 2012-11-05 by jcs

As regular Irreal readers know, I mostly avoid the tech wars and especially tech wars involving Apple. I use Apple products and like them very much. I also use Linux, FreeBSD, and various other platforms so although I admit to … Continue reading →

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DOS Amplification Attacks

Posted on 2012-11-04 by jcs

Matthew Prince over at the CloudFlare Blog has a nice post on DNS Amplification DDos Attacks. He starts by explaining that DNS amplification attacks are descendants of the old Smurf Attacks. He goes on to show how they work and … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.1 Is Out

Posted on 2012-11-03 by jcs

Steel Bank Common Lisp 1.1.1 is out. As usual, compilation and installation were a snap. Out of irrational paranoia I always run the verification tests after I compile. Of course, everything was fine: all the tests except those expected to … Continue reading →

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Elnode Video

Posted on 2012-11-02 by jcs

Nic Ferrier’s Elnode project is a great example of the power that Emacs and Emacs Lisp can deliver. Its almost unbelievable that you can run a Web server inside Emacs, but that’s what Elnode does. Once again we see in … Continue reading →

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Recursive Input to query-replace

Posted on 2012-11-01 by jcs

The other day I needed to change all occurrences of a certain Unicode character with another in a large file. No problem, I thought, I’ll just fire off a query-replace and be done. Of course, now I had to enter … Continue reading →

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Securing WordPress Sites

Posted on 2012-10-31 by jcs

WordPress.tv has an interesting video by Chris Wiegman of bit51 entitled Securing WordPress is Easier Than Making Coffee. If you have a WordPress site this is worth an hour of your time. He begins by showing how a seemingly trivial … Continue reading →

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Remapping the Caps Lock Key

Posted on 2012-10-30 by jcs

Read any article on optimizing your workflow with Emacs and odds are the first recommendation is to remap 【caps lock】 to 【Ctrl】. For as long as I can remember, the first thing I’ve done when setting up a new machine … Continue reading →

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