Author Archives: jcs

JSON And S-Expressions Redux

Posted on 2012-01-23 by jcs

After yesterday’s post on JSON Versus S-Expressions I thought that one obvious solution for people who want to use JSON tools to process logs is to have the (Lisp-based) logs convert themselves to JSON much like we did for S-expressions … Continue reading →

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More On JSON Versus S-Expressions

Posted on 2012-01-22 by jcs

I’ve written several posts on JSON, most recently here and here. These last two posts considered the advantages of JSON over S-expressions for writing log files. Although S-expressions are more powerful and flexible than JSON, as explained in the 7-part … Continue reading →

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PostgreSQL 9.2 To Support JSON As A Core Type

Posted on 2012-01-21 by jcs

Andrew Dunstan has a post in his Andrew’s PostgreSQL blog reporting that PostgreSQL 9.2 will support JSON as a core type. This is yet another reason to favor JSON as a universal log reporting format as I discussed in my … Continue reading →

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Functional Thinking

Posted on 2012-01-20 by jcs

Here’s an interesting talk about thinking in a functional way by Neal Ford. I’ve tagged this post as Lisp but Ford doesn’t use Lisp—he uses some weird mutation of Java, a little Groovy, and a little Scala. The point of … Continue reading →

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Useful Emacs Commands Reference

Posted on 2012-01-19 by jcs

Xah Lee has several useful reference pages, such as this one of HTML/XML Entities, that I use all the time. I have them bookmarked for easy reference so that when I, for example, need to know the Unicode character for … Continue reading →

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Emacs On Google+ And Strange Keybindings

Posted on 2012-01-18 by jcs

Xah Lee announced on his Emacs Blog that he has started an Emacs stream on G+. If you’re interested in Emacs, you should check it out. You don’t have to be a G+ member to read the posts. Also interesting … Continue reading →

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Safety And The Lisp Read Function

Posted on 2012-01-17 by jcs

For all my blathering about security, here’s a potential exploit in Common Lisp that I never thought about. William Halliburton has a nice explanation of Lisp’s read function and the assoicated read-macro #.. When read sees the sequence #. it … Continue reading →

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Blogging With Emacs—Another Method

Posted on 2012-01-16 by jcs

Today, someone on Hacker News pointed to an old post on Blogging With Emacs over at Work In Progress. Since some of my readers had expressed an interest in how I use Emacs and Org-mode to blog, I thought there … Continue reading →

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Working With Matching Lines In Emacs

Posted on 2012-01-15 by jcs

This is another note to myself. For some reason I have a hard time remembering the handful of commands that do things to the lines in a buffer that match a regular expression. The table below are the ones that … Continue reading →

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The Popularity Of Programming Languages

Posted on 2012-01-14 by jcs

TIOBE Software has published its list of programming language popularity for January 2012 and awarded Objective-C the TIOBE Programming Language Award for 2011. The award is given for the language with the most growth in market share for the year. … Continue reading →

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