Author Archives: jcs

Reader Macros

Posted on 2012-10-09 by jcs

J.V. Toups over at Dorophone has a nice, short introduction to Common Lisp reader macros. The conventional wisdom is that it’s best to avoid reader macros when you can and the use cases that Toups examines probably fall into that … Continue reading →

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Editing A Column of Numbers

Posted on 2012-10-08 by jcs

Alex Schroeder has an interesting post on editing a column of numbers. The problem is that given some text such as |[[…]] | 1 | 6563| 3796| |[[…]] | — | |[[…]] | 1/3 | 2315| 1259| |[[…]] | — … Continue reading →

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More Common Lisp Tweets

Posted on 2012-10-07 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis has announced a “massive reorganization” of his Common Lisp tweets collection. He’s also added 200 about 70 new tweets to the collection for a total of almost 200. In the past, I’ve recommended going to his site for … Continue reading →

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Computer Attacks in Real Time

Posted on 2012-10-06 by jcs

BetaBeat has a fascinating article (via The Atlantic Wire) on a Honey Pot project that allows you to watch attacks as they happen. Every time there’s an attack, a red dot explodes on a world map at the source of … Continue reading →

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NIST Announces SHA-3

Posted on 2012-10-05 by jcs

NIST just announced the winner of the SHA-3 competition: it’s Keccak. The Keccak hash uses a completely different strategy from the SHA-2 family, something that most analysts view as an advantage. It’s not clear how quickly Keccak will be integrated … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.1.0

Posted on 2012-10-04 by jcs

SBCL 1.1.0 has been released and is available from the SBCL Download page. Although they have brought the OS X binary up to date, I chose to compile from source. The compilation ran without difficulty and as far as I … Continue reading →

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Stop!

Posted on 2012-10-03 by jcs

Please. Stop. This. I’ve asked, nicely, previously. Now I’m getting annoyed. I’ve said it before: If you want Python, you know where to get it.

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An Analysis of PIN Numbers

Posted on 2012-10-02 by jcs

Over at Data Genetics there’s a great analysis of PIN numbers. By aggregating data from several breaches Nick Berry gathered 3.4 million PIN numbers and performed extensive analysis on them. Every possible value was represented in the sample but they … Continue reading →

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Editing The Occur Buffer

Posted on 2012-10-01 by jcs

Here’s a great Emacs 24 tip from Xah Lee’s Google+ ErgoEmacs circle. If you’re in an Emacs occur buffer you can call 【Meta+x】 occur-edit-mode and then make changes to the occur buffer that will be reflected in the original file. … Continue reading →

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Apple Maps

Posted on 2012-09-30 by jcs

Much has been written lately about Apple abandoning Google maps in favor of their own in iOS 6. There are, it seems to me, two aspects to the change and the imbroglio that followed. The first is why Apple decided … Continue reading →

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