Author Archives: jcs

Script Kiddies At Work

Posted on 2012-03-07 by jcs

Kura over at SYSLOG has a really great animation showing the origins of SSH attacks on a single server during a 24 hour period. It’s another reminder, if you needed one, to lock down your machines. It’s pretty obvious these … Continue reading →

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JSON Versus S-Expressions (Again)

Posted on 2012-03-06 by jcs

I’ve written several posts concerning the relative merits of JSON vs S-expressions (1, 2, 3, 4) and concluded that while s-expressions are more powerful and flexible, JSON might be a better choice because it’s supported by virtually all programming languages. … Continue reading →

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DMR Stories

Posted on 2012-03-05 by jcs

Mike Maney over at Maney Digital has a very nice tribute up for Dennis Ritchie. While he was at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Maney talked to some of dmr’s colleagues and captured their words on his Flip. The … Continue reading →

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Reversing An Emacs Lisp List In-Place

Posted on 2012-03-03 by jcs

Yesterday, Xah Lee put up a post that showed how to reverse arrays and lists in various languages, including Emacs Lisp. His Elisp examples worked only for arrays so I added one for lists in the comments. Later I realized … Continue reading →

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The Emacs set-variable Command

Posted on 2012-03-02 by jcs

I learned a new Emacs command today. What do you do when you want to set an Emacs variable? Until today my answer was 【Meta+:】 and then (setq some-variable some-value) That works well and there’s nothing wrong with it but … Continue reading →

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AT&T To Cap Unlimited Data Plans

Posted on 2012-03-01 by jcs

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T is going to cap unlimited data plans. Truth to tell, it’s not much of a change because they were already slowing download speeds for the top 5% of their bandwidth consumers. Now … Continue reading →

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Yegge On Dynamic Languages

Posted on 2012-02-28 by jcs

I stumbled upon a nice talk that Steve Yegge gave at Stanford in 2008. The talk, entitled Dynamic Languages Strike Back, debunks some of the myths about the performance, optimization, and tools for dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl, … Continue reading →

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ESR: An Open Letter To Chris Dodd

Posted on 2012-02-27 by jcs

Eric Raymond has posted An Open Letter to Chris Dodd concerning Big Media’s approach to the Internet. It is, I think, an important letter and one that most hackers and Irreal readers will agree with. That’s not the same, of … Continue reading →

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Reproducible Science

Posted on 2012-02-26 by jcs

Ars Technica has an interesting article up entitled Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source. I’ve written a couple of times about reproducible research and how Emacs and Org Mode make it particularly … Continue reading →

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Multiple Editors And Markdown

Posted on 2012-02-25 by jcs

I’ve written many, many times about how much I love writing in Org mode. I write a plain text file that I can then export to HTML, LaTeX, or several other formats. I can even, theoretically, write an Org mode … Continue reading →

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