Author Archives: jcs

The Emacs comment-dwim Command

I really like the Emacs comment-dwim command. The dwim—do what I mean—neatly captures the idea of the command. It looks at the context in which it is called and then does the right thing™. Most often, I highlight a region … Continue reading

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Recursive Greps

I’ve been using the Unix grep utility for over 20 years but today I learned something new. Mikko Ohtamaa over at Open Source Hacker has a nice post on Power searching using UNIX grep. The post explores some of the … Continue reading

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The Social Network of a Word

I ran across an interesting interview question the other day: Given a base word and a list of other words, use the Levenshtein distance to find the social network of the base word in the list of other words. More … Continue reading

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Scrolling with Lion, Redux

As I wrote yesterday, my laptop recently had major surgery. That appears to have gone well but when I got the machine back I noticed that it had Snow Leopard installed instead of Lion. I knew they were going to … Continue reading

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Back!

Annnnnd, I’m back. For the one or two of you who may have wondered were I’ve been, here’s the story. Last month, between the fifteenth and twentieth, I was in New York. I didn’t have to a chance to queue … Continue reading

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Using Quickproject

Earlier this week I wrote about Using Quicklisp and mentioned another Xach project, Quickproject (the link takes you to Github, but the best way to get it is with Quicklisp). What quickproject does is to initialize a project.asd, package.lisp, project.lisp, … Continue reading

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John Gruber On The Latest DVD Silliness

ars technica is reporting that DVDs and Blu-rays will now carry two unskippable government warnings. These warnings—the usual nonsense about going to hell and jail if you copy the DVD/Blue-ray—will be shown back-to-back for 10 seconds each and will be … Continue reading

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cl-test-grid

Vladimir Sedach has a post up that describes the cl-test-grid project. The idea is that Quicklisp users download the cl-test-grid, tell it what CL implementations are available, and run the test. It runs tests against many of the libraries in … Continue reading

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Scheme and Common Lisp

I’ve been using Scheme and Common Lisp almost exclusively for over 10 years. During that time, I tended to favor Scheme because I liked its clean design and simplicity, the named let, continuations, and the simplicity that being a Lisp-1 … Continue reading

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Using Quicklisp

Back in March I wrote that I had loaded and starting using Zach Beane’s Quicklisp. Since then I have used it with several small projects and I really like it. It does two things for me: Makes it super easy … Continue reading

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