Author Archives: jcs

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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A Page on Emacs 24’s New Features

Posted on 2012-06-13 by jcs

Xah Lee has started a page on New Features in Emacs 24. He’s promising to add to it every few days so it might be a good place to go to get familiar with some of Emacs 24’s new goodies … Continue reading →

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Muscle Memory

Posted on 2012-06-12 by jcs

I can so empathize.

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Living Without Flash

Posted on 2012-06-11 by jcs

Let’s face it: Flash is a mess. Hardly a week goes by without a new exploit and its performance problems are legion. Steve Jobs famously hated Flash and refused to allow its use in iOS. My Linux distribution strongly recommends … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.1 Has Been Released

Posted on 2012-06-10 by jcs

Emacs 24.1 is ready for download from the usual places. There’s all kinds of little improvements that we’ve talked about from time to time but the main features, as described by the release notice, are: The new packaging system. This … Continue reading →

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Emacs display-battery-mode

Posted on 2012-06-09 by jcs

I have occasionally run across the Emacs display-battery-mode command—it’s in Aaron Hawley’s excellent reference sheet, for example. I never bothered really looking at it because my MacBook Pro already has an battery status icon on the menu bar. Today, out … Continue reading →

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Blind Tennis

Posted on 2012-06-08 by jcs

The next time you’re tempted to whine about how hard a task is; how it’s simply impossible; how obviously no one could be expected to do it: remember this. I know I will.

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Password Advice

Posted on 2012-06-07 by jcs

There’s been a lot of snark going around the last few days over this password help screen from the Texas Attorney General’s Child Support Services Web Page. Child Support Services are, of course, doing the best they can to preserve … Continue reading →

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Error and Restarts in Common Lisp

Posted on 2012-06-06 by jcs

Robert Smith over at Symbo1ics Ideas has a very nice introduction to restarts in Common Lisp. Restarts are a part of the CL error system (more accurately, part of the CL condition system) and provide a way to recover from … Continue reading →

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