Author Archives: jcs

Whither TextMate?

Posted on 2012-08-14 by jcs

Allan Odgaard recently announced that he is open sourcing the popular Mac editor TextMate. I’ve long considered it one of the few editors suitable for serious programmers so I treated the announcement as good news. It means that (what I … Continue reading →

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When SSL Is Not SSL

Posted on 2012-08-13 by jcs

Troy Hunt has a nice post on SSL and how many sites misuse it. As Hunt says, SSL is not about encryption. The problem that Hunt is writing about is sites that deliver a login page, say, in http and … Continue reading →

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Emacs Compilation Errors

Posted on 2012-08-12 by jcs

Over at the Definitely a plug blog there’s a very nice mini-tutorial on using the Emacs compilation facility. When you use 【Meta+x】 compile to run a compilation process, Emacs will parse the error output and allow you to step through … Continue reading →

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Forensics with DRAKMA

Posted on 2012-08-11 by jcs

I ran across the Open States Website, which provides information on legislative activity for many (and eventually all) of the U.S. states. They have an API that allows you to query information via http and get answers formatted as JSON. … Continue reading →

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Now Let’s All Enjoy A Moment of Schadenfreude

Posted on 2012-08-10 by jcs

ZDNet is reporting that SCO is in Chapter 7 and thus effectively dead. They’ve been in Chapter 11 since 2007 and really had no hope of getting out so this news is not surprising. Those of us with memories of … Continue reading →

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Reusability and NIH

Posted on 2012-08-09 by jcs

Peter Donis has a nice post discussing a programming challenge given to Knuth and critiqued by McIlroy. Don Knuth, certainly one the premier computer scientists (period) was asked to demonstrate literate programming by solving a simple problem involving finding the … Continue reading →

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Even The New York Times Is Getting A Clue

Posted on 2012-08-08 by jcs

The New York Times Sunday Review has an interesting article on piracy. They invoke the common metaphor of Whac-A-Mole and conclude that Internet piracy is not going away and that the content industry is fooling themselves to believe otherwise. They … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Configuration File

Posted on 2012-08-07 by jcs

Xah Lee has an interesting post on organizing your emacs init file in which he advocates breaking your .emacs or init.el file into several subfiles. Generally when people do this they organize the subfiles by category or function—all the items … Continue reading →

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The Dropbox Breakin

Posted on 2012-08-06 by jcs

Much is being made of the supposed Dropbox break in. Several users reported that they started receiving spam at email addresses that were only used with their Dropbox accounts. Dropbox, to their credit, immediately launched an investigation and brought in … Continue reading →

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Tips for Using Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2012-08-05 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has a nice post entitled Tips on Emacs Lisp programming. The post has been mentioned by many of the Emacs aggregators but it’s a nice post and worth a shout out. Ferrier takes the position that Elisp is … Continue reading →

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