Author Archives: jcs

Prompting for User Input with Elisp

Posted on 2012-08-04 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice tutorial on getting user input with Emacs Lisp. Most Elisp programmers are aware of the interactive control strings for this purpose and most of us probably use that for most occasions requiring user input: (defun … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A New PDF Version of SICP

Posted on 2012-08-03 by jcs

Long time readers know of my love affair with Abelson & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I regard it as certainly one of the best and arguably the best computer science books ever written. MIT Press, in a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Building ELPA Packages

Posted on 2012-08-02 by jcs

I’ve written about ELPA from the user’s viewpoint a couple of times. If you’re an Elisp developer and want to get your project into ELPA or Marmalade, Nic Ferrier has a nice post that details the steps. This is a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Twenty Years of Vim

Posted on 2012-08-01 by jcs

Ars Technica has a nice article on the twentieth anniversary of that other editor. Worth a read even if you aren’t a vi(m) enthusiast. One fact that I didn’t know—even after years and years of being a vi/vim user—is that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Scheduled Outage

Posted on 2012-07-31 by jcs

Irreal’s hosting provider has notified me that the site will be down for scheduled maintenance on August 4th, from 12:01am to 4:00am EDT (UTC-0400).

Posted in Administrivia | Leave a comment

Malware Prophylaxis

Posted on 2012-07-30 by jcs

After last week’s malware outbreak at Irreal I’ve been thinking about ways to prevent another episode. For those who haven’t been following along, someone managed to add a line of obfuscated PHP to the index.php file that gets things going … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Does Anyone Really Think This Is A Problem?

Posted on 2012-07-29 by jcs

Oliver Reichenstein over at the iA has a strange post/article positing that nested directories are hard to understand. Reichenstein celebrates the iOS/Mountain Lion approach to file systems in which directories can be at most one level deep (and even that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 6 Comments

Syncing With Git Repositories

Posted on 2012-07-28 by jcs

Last month, I wrote about how I keep my two main machines in sync using git and how, after doing a git pull, I use a bit of Elisp to automate the reverting of my open buffers. After automating the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 7 Comments

The Master Speaks

Posted on 2012-07-27 by jcs

The road to wisdom begins with a single step, grasshopper.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Diceware in Lisp

Posted on 2012-07-26 by jcs

I recently downloaded the Ironclad Cryptography Library with quicklisp and wanted to give it a spin. I thought a nice little project would be to implement the Diceware password generation algorithm in Lisp. This turned out to be really easy. … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment