Author Archives: jcs

Site Outage

Posted on 2012-02-21 by jcs

My hosting provider has informed me that Irreal.org will be down for maintenance from 12:01 am to 4:00 am on February 25.

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The Solution To Piracy: Cartoon Version

Posted on 2012-02-21 by jcs

A while ago I wrote a post on Paul Tassi’s Forbes article You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You. That was a great article with many cogent arguments but if it was TL;DR for you, here’s … Continue reading →

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Using Emacs

Posted on 2012-02-20 by jcs

Vincent Foley over at Occasionally sane has an interesting post entitled Why I Still Use Emacs. Foley lists the usual suspects (extensibility, Org Mode, GUI or CLI operation, excellent built-in documentation, configurability, Tramp, and all the other reasons we love … Continue reading →

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Lisp In The Debian Distribution

Posted on 2012-02-19 by jcs

This is interesting and sort of surprising. James Bromberger over at JEB’s Blog takes a look at Debian’s forthcoming Wheezy distribution and, among many other interesting facts, reports that Lisp is the 8th most popular language for developing the packages … Continue reading →

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Not Macros; Read

Posted on 2012-02-18 by jcs

James Long has an interesting post up at his blog entitled Lisp: It’s Not About Macros, It’s About Read in which he argues that what makes Lisp so powerful is not really macros but the read function. The reason for … Continue reading →

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(Re)Naming Functions

Posted on 2012-02-17 by jcs

This is another note to myself. Quite often we want to give a function another name. Sometimes this is because we want a shorter name for a function that we use a lot. For example, even though I use smex … Continue reading →

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Generalized Variables and Macros 2

Posted on 2012-02-16 by jcs

Yesterday we talked about some of the difficulties in using setf in a macro and how these difficulties can sometimes be overcome by using the mysterious define-modify-macro. Today, I want to look at a more general approach that will also … Continue reading →

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Generalized Variables and Macros 1

Posted on 2012-02-15 by jcs

One of the wonders of Common Lisp is the generalized variable. Roughly speaking, a generalized variable is an expression that can serve as the first argument to setf. The official explanation, as given in Common Lisp the Language, 2ed., is … Continue reading →

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Some RSA Public Keys Are Insecure

Posted on 2012-02-14 by jcs

According to The New York Times, a team of European and American researchers have discovered that some (about 0.2%) RSA public keys are insecure. The insecurity is the result of using prime factors that aren’t cryptographically random. I’m still reading … Continue reading →

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UTF-8 Characters In Emacs

Posted on 2012-02-11 by jcs

I’ve mentioned several times that I use Xah Lee’s excellent HTML/XML Entities List page to look up the code points for UTF-8 characters that I sometimes use in my blog posts. For example, in writing about Emacs Registers I wrote … Continue reading →

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