Author Archives: jcs

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 →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Programming | Tagged | 3 Comments

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 →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Handy Interactive Unicode Reference

Posted on 2011-04-29 by jcs

Unicode is a wonderful thing. It gives us every conceivable alphabet and a large set of non-alphabetic symbols as well. The problem for me is that I’m lost as soon as I step outside the familiar ASCII subset. There are … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Apple Responds

Posted on 2011-04-27 by jcs

Just as I predicted in my Two Tales post, Apple has responded to the consolidated.db brouhaha. And just as predicted by the serious commenters on the issue, Apple was not tracking users but merely caching data that helps with location … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

org2blog

Posted on 2011-04-27 by jcs

Now that I’ve moved my blog to WordPress, I’m simplifying my work flow by using org2blog. It’s still early days—I’ve only published three posts and the about page with it—but so far I like it a lot. I write my … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging | Tagged | Leave a comment