Author Archives: jcs

R and Babel

Posted on 2011-05-09 by jcs

I decided to accept my own challenge so I downloaded and installed R. It’s a huge system with a lot to learn but I did manage to figure out enough to generate some basic statistics and a couple graphs. I’ll … Continue reading →

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Doing It Wrong

Posted on 2011-05-08 by jcs

Yesterday, I blogged about a company, LastPass, that takes security seriously and has well thought out procedures in place to protect its users. LastPass is a small company run by relatively young people who have perhaps a decade’s experience in … Continue reading →

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Doing It Right

Posted on 2011-05-07 by jcs

By now, even the non-Geeks among us have heard of the Sony PSN and Online Entertainment break ins and the subsequent loss of personal information and perhaps credit card numbers of over a 100 million Sony customers. Sony admitted that … Continue reading →

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Another region-or-thing Example

Posted on 2011-05-06 by jcs

In my last post on region-or-thing, I promised an example that uses the bounds information that region-or-thing returns. This example is much like the google-search function except that instead of looking up a word or phrase in Google, it turns … Continue reading →

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region-or-thing

Posted on 2011-05-05 by jcs

Emacs Lisp has an amazingly useful function called thing-at-point, which will return the object that the point is currently on. You call it as (thing-at-point THING) where THING is a symbol that specifies the kind of object you want. Possibilities, … Continue reading →

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AirPush: NOT Coming to an iPhone Near You

Posted on 2011-05-04 by jcs

Apple’s App Store gets a lot of grief for their locked down curation process—seemingly always with a reference to “walled gardens.” There’s a lot of truth in many of those complaints but only if you’re an iPhone developer; users aren’t … Continue reading →

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10,000 Steps

Posted on 2011-05-03 by jcs

About a year ago, I bought Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. That was the first time I had ever read about the health benefits of taking at least 10,000 steps … Continue reading →

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crowdflow.net

Posted on 2011-05-02 by jcs

In an interesting coda to the Apple consolidated.db story that I blogged about here and here, some German hackers have started crowdflow.net, a Web site dedicated to generating an open source database of WiFi and Cell sites similar to that … Continue reading →

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FIFO Queues in Scheme and Lisp

Posted on 2011-05-01 by jcs

FIFO queues are a standard data structure that have many uses but they can be surprisingly difficult to get right. The standard implementation is an array with two pointers called front and rear. It’s the details of maintaining the pointers … Continue reading →

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Just. Kill. Me. Now.

Posted on 2011-04-30 by jcs

I’m currently serving as Technical Editor for a book by one of my publisher’s sister imprints. It’s interesting work and I enjoy it. What I don’t enjoy is working with Word and its clones. This imprint insists on .doc files … Continue reading →

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