Author Archives: jcs

Spam: There’s A Lot Of That Going Around

Posted on 2012-03-17 by jcs

Last week I wrote about a spike in forum spam that Irreal is seeing (1, 2). Of course, Irreal is a small site and even on our worst days we see at most 10–15 spam comments. Charlie Stross, a noted … Continue reading →

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Linking To Receipts

Posted on 2012-03-17 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I use Emacs and Org mode to track expenses for tax purposes. At the heart of the system are Org tables for various categories of expenses. Last month, I wrote about how a small piece … Continue reading →

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Virtual Dired

Posted on 2012-03-14 by jcs

Today, I stumbled upon Kirubakaran Athmanathan’s post Efficiently Browsing Text or Code and learned a new Emacs trick. Athmanathan’s post is about leveraging the power of Emacs to efficiently find some text in a large group of files, choose the … Continue reading →

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Smells And Properties

Posted on 2012-03-13 by jcs

Paul Graham has posted a provocative essay on the copyright wars. He starts by recalling a childhood tale in which the owner of a food shop grows annoyed when a poor student enjoys the delicious smell of his cooking food. … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, And Elisp Compared

Posted on 2012-03-12 by jcs

A month ago we had a lively discussion here at Irreal on the question of whether or not Elisp sucks. As with most questions of this sort, there were champions of both positions: some felt that Elisp is a distinctly … Continue reading →

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Spam Update

Posted on 2012-03-12 by jcs

I’m seeing yet another spike in spam so I’ve reluctantly turned on moderation again. If NuCaptcha can plug the hole that appears to be allowing this spam I will, of course, turn it off again. Interestingly, one mystery is solved. … Continue reading →

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Spam Raises Its Head Again

Posted on 2012-03-11 by jcs

After a period of virtually no forum spam I’m seeing a spike in the amount of spam. This may be because of the recent NuCaptcha break or it may be due to the spammers using a Mechanical Turk-like strategy of … Continue reading →

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Quicklisp

Posted on 2012-03-10 by jcs

After being inspired to finally start using ELPA to handle my Emacs packages, I decided to try out Zach Beane’s Quicklisp library manager for Common Lisp. Up until now, I’ve been using the manual method to get things into ASDF, … Continue reading →

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ELPA

Posted on 2012-03-09 by jcs

I’ve been meaning to install ELPA for a long time but never got around to it. Then Emacs 24 was on the horizon and I thought, “Why bother going through the pain of installing it when it will be included … Continue reading →

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TSA: Worse Than You Thought

Posted on 2012-03-08 by jcs

Jon Corbett over at TSA Out of Our Pants is making his displeasure with the TSA felt and in the process has become a real thorn in their side. After being denied access to his flight when he refused to … Continue reading →

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