Author Archives: jcs

Setting the Babel Evaluate Confirm Status

Posted on 2011-05-15 by jcs

Because Babel provides a facility to execute arbitrary code, it presents a security risk. Code blocks are evaluated when a document is exported as well as when a user explicitly asks for evaluation by typing C-c C-c in the block. … Continue reading →

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Kicking the Hornet’s Nest

Posted on 2011-05-14 by jcs

Bloomberg Businessweek has an article up entitled Sony: The Company That Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. It’s about the break in and Sony’s penchant for suing and prosecuting “hackers.” There’s not much new in the article (although their telling of the … Continue reading →

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Fibonacci Run Times

Posted on 2011-05-14 by jcs

­ This posts combines the results of the last two posts. I thought it would be interesting to compare the actual run times of the three methods of calculating Fibonacci numbers so I put together a Babel table like the … Continue reading →

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Calculating the Fibonacci Numbers

Posted on 2011-05-13 by jcs

If, like me, you’re fascinated by the Fibonacci numbers you should take a look at Robin Houston’s The Worst Algorithm in the World post over at the Bosker Blog. Houston lists and analyzes the three main ways of calculating fib(n): … Continue reading →

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Calling Babel From A Table

Posted on 2011-05-12 by jcs

While I was reading the Lisp Idioms article that I blogged about yesterday, it occurred to me that the first example on accumulating a list presents an excellent opportunity to talk some more about Babel and how to use it … Continue reading →

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An Oldie but Goodie

Posted on 2011-05-11 by jcs

I stumbled across this list of Lisp idioms on Hacker News yesterday. I’ve seen it before and if you’ve been around for a while, you probably have too. Still, it’s always fun to read it again. I enjoy the terse … Continue reading →

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LastPass and the Press

Posted on 2011-05-10 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of posts about LastPass recently, both with praise for the way they are handling a potential security event. One might think that I’m a satisfied customer or even an investor but, in fact, I’d never heard … Continue reading →

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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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