Author Archives: jcs

How To Design a Successful Programming Language

Posted on 2012-06-23 by jcs

Sooner or later, every programmer gets bitten by the “I want to design a programming language” bug. Sadly, most of these efforts, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, and Yukihiro Matsumoto notwithstanding, will come to naught. Now Caleb Garling reveals the … Continue reading →

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A Contrast

Posted on 2012-06-22 by jcs

From time to time something happens to make me think that maybe big media has caught a clue and is moving to saner policies. The last such example was Tor’s abandonment of DMR—a significant step forward. Sadly, reality inevitably intrudes … Continue reading →

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Reverting All Buffers

Posted on 2012-06-21 by jcs

I have two machines on which I do most of my writing and development: a 27″ iMac and a 5 year old MacBook Pro. I use both of these computers everyday so I need to keep them in sync. I … Continue reading →

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RSA Explained

Posted on 2012-06-20 by jcs

Barry Steyn over at I’m Still Learning has a nice post on RSA and how it works. Steyn explains the needed mathematical background in small pieces that should be accessible to everyone. At each step he works through a small … Continue reading →

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The Emacs CL Controversy

Posted on 2012-06-19 by jcs

The other day I was griping to Xah Lee off-line about the refusal of the Emacs maintainers to add the CL package functionality to the core Elisp distribution. Lee pointed me at several threads on the emacs-devel mailing list that … Continue reading →

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Flame Malware Uses New MD5 Collision Attack

Posted on 2012-06-18 by jcs

Much has been written lately about the provenance of the Flame malware. Recent reports suggest that it was a joint project of the United States and Israel. Now comes the startling revelation that Flame used a hitherto unknown MD5 collision … Continue reading →

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Installing Aspell

Posted on 2012-06-17 by jcs

As I posted yesterday, it turns out that I have some old 32 bit software left over from Fink installs on my machines. As far as I know, none of it was being used except for Ispell. Once I got … Continue reading →

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Building Emacs 24 on OS X Lion

Posted on 2012-06-16 by jcs

Now that Emacs 24.1 was officially released it was time to stop messing around and actually get it installed. I tried that last year but had problems with configure not finding tputs in any of the curses libraries. This time … Continue reading →

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Hashing Passwords

Posted on 2012-06-15 by jcs

Patrick Nielsen over at Throwing Fire has an excellent post on Storing Passwords Securely that serves as a nice coda to my previous post on Password Advice. One of the problems that I pointed out in that post was the … Continue reading →

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Replacing a Region With the Last Kill

Posted on 2012-06-14 by jcs

I learned a another neat trick from Aaron Hawley’s Giant Emacs Reference Sheet. This is another of those tricks, like the revert buffer shortcut, that uses keystrokes intended to do something else in a novel way to accomplish something unexpected. … Continue reading →

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