Author Archives: jcs

Security and Unicode

Posted on 2011-08-28 by jcs

I’ve written before about the wonders of Unicode but this post is an example of its dark side. Over at the Microsoft Malware Protection Center there is an interesting post about the use of Unicode by malware. It seems that … Continue reading →

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Keyboard Macro Counters

Posted on 2011-08-27 by jcs

Emacs is incredibly useful for repetitive editing chores. For example, this Xah Lee post shows how Lee performed major surgery on hundreds of pages of HTML by using a little Emacs Lisp. Not everyone can or wants to write Emacs … Continue reading →

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Git By Hand

Posted on 2011-08-26 by jcs

I went looking for the update to Tom Preston-Werner’s talk on Git that I wrote about previously but I didn’t find it. What I did find, however, is another talk on Git, entitled Unlocking the Secrets of Git that he … Continue reading →

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SSH Tricks

Posted on 2011-08-25 by jcs

Smylers over at the Smylers Blog has an outstanding post on little known things you can do with SSH. Even after years of using SSH daily, there were still a couple of tricks new to me in the post. Smylers … Continue reading →

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How Passwords Get Stolen

Posted on 2011-08-24 by jcs

I just stumbled across a nice post on How Attackers Steal Passwords by Joe Golton over at FilterJoe. It’s an interesting look at the common attacks on user passwords. There’s not a lot new or surprising in the post but … Continue reading →

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Administrivia: Captchas

Posted on 2011-08-23 by jcs

The amount of comment spam has reached intolerable levels: spam comments far outnumber legitimate comments and moderating them is taking an increasing amount of time. Therefore, I have reluctantly installed a captcha to try to bring the problem under control. … Continue reading →

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Emacs Ruler Mode

Posted on 2011-08-23 by jcs

Sometimes it’s convenient to have a ruler on your Emacs screen. Not often but sometimes. For example, it can be useful for lining things up in artist-mode. Emacs has a very nice ruler that, among other things, tracks were the … Continue reading →

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Emacs Vs

Posted on 2011-08-22 by jcs

I’ve just run across an interesting site created by Strzelewicz Alexandre called Emacs Vs or Emacs Vote System. Users post their favorite Emacs tricks and the other users vote them up or down—much like Hacker News or reddit. The current … Continue reading →

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Diceware Implementation (Part 2)

Posted on 2011-08-21 by jcs

Last time I presented an implementation of the Diceware method for generating a secure password. Today I’d like to finish up with a few details. First, the careful reader might wonder why I generated 4 random bytes with RAND_bytes instead … Continue reading →

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An Implementation of Diceware

Posted on 2011-08-20 by jcs

A few of my recent posts (1, 2, 3) discussed the Diceware method of choosing a password. The idea is that you roll a die 5 times to get a 5 digit number and use that number to look up … Continue reading →

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