Author Archives: jcs

More On Borders’ Closing

Posted on 2011-07-26 by jcs

David Hill over at Singularity Hub has an interesting take on the closing of Borders. While agreeing that Borders’ downfall is a shame, Hill argues that it will actually be a huge win for authors and readers. It will benefit … Continue reading →

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Aligning Text With Regular Expressions in Emacs

Posted on 2011-07-25 by jcs

This is really a note to myself. A while ago I ran across this post over at RAW SYNTAX about the Emacs command align-regexp. I don’t require this functionality very often but when I do, align-regexp is just what I … Continue reading →

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Traveling Without A Computer

Posted on 2011-07-23 by jcs

Heh heh. OK, that was a teaser title. Of course, I would never go anywhere without a computer; my days of being ABEND are long over. My normal routine is to take my MacBook Pro and associated equipment with me … Continue reading →

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Xah’s Challenge (Part 2)

Posted on 2011-07-21 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about Xah Lee’s programming challenge and gave a solution similar to Lee’s own. Today I will give another, possibly simpler, solution. We start with some constants and a couple of helper functions: (defconst brackets ‘((?( . ?)) … Continue reading →

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Xah’s Challenge

Posted on 2011-07-20 by jcs

A couple of days ago Xah Lee posed a programming challenge. The problem was to write a miniparser in your favorite language to detect mismatched bracketing characters in a set of text files. The set of brackets to be checked … Continue reading →

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Common iPhone Pins

Posted on 2011-07-20 by jcs

I’ve written several (1, 2, 3) posts about the analysis of passwords divulged by groups like LulzSec. The results were terrifyingly consistent: 123456 and password were almost always the most frequently used passwords. Now Daniel Amitay author of the Big … Continue reading →

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Goodbye Borders

Posted on 2011-07-19 by jcs

Although it’s a little outside of our usual subject matter, I sadly note the passing of Borders. Yesterday Borders announced that it was canceling its upcoming bankruptcy auction and liquidating the company instead. Although some creditors are objecting, it’s almost … Continue reading →

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The 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors

Posted on 2011-07-18 by jcs

Each year the SANS Institute and the MITRE Corporation team up to survey the year’s most dangerous programming errors. This year’s list, the 2011 Common Weakness Enumeration, was published at the end of June. This is a great resource and … Continue reading →

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An Interesting Talk On Guile

Posted on 2011-07-16 by jcs

I just ran across an interesting talk on Guile Scheme by Andy Wingo. The talk is from 2009, shortly before Guile 2.0 came out. Wingo discusses the new Guile architecture and plans for a native compiler. One of the most … Continue reading →

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Marking Up Key Sequences For HTML

Posted on 2011-07-14 by jcs

The other day, I wrote about Xah Lee’s post on aliases. One of his aliases was for htmlize-keyboard-shortcut-notation. I realized that this was probably the function he used to markup the key sequences in his posts and I had (yet … Continue reading →

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