Category Archives: General

A Quick Test for Prospective Employers

Posted on 2015-12-16 by jcs

Via Karl Voit: Related: Visiting a potential employer? Check the toilets. Singly-ply sandpaper says a lot about their actual values. — Bernd Haug (@xaibeha) November 23, 2015 It seems a little silly at first but, really, it serves as a … Continue reading →

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A Quiz

Posted on 2015-12-16 by jcs

After the Paris bloodbath, which was discussed more? a) gross state intelligence failures b) absurd encryption claims — Kontra (@counternotions) December 15, 2015

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Steno Machines

Posted on 2015-12-15 by jcs

We’ve all seen them, either in person or in courtroom dramas. Those odd looking little machines that appear more like old fashioned adding machines rather than typewriters. I’m talking, of course, about steno machines. They’re used to provide verbatim transcripts … Continue reading →

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Karl Voit on Moving from Screen to Tmux

Posted on 2015-12-14 by jcs

If you spend a lot of time using your terminal to log into remote machines, you are probably aware of GNU Screen and tmux. If you aren’t using one of these, you should definitely check them out. They work nicely … Continue reading →

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An Interview with Matt Blaze

Posted on 2015-12-13 by jcs

Back in 1993, Matt Blaze put done to the first round of the crypto wars by demonstrating devastating flaws in the NSA’s Clipper Chip that was supposed to allow the government to securely monitor encrypted communications. Sadly, those lessons have … Continue reading →

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Sacha Chats with Our New Emacs Maintainer

Posted on 2015-12-12 by jcs

Sacha Chua has chatted with John Wiegley several times (see here, here, and here). Wiegley’s an interesting guy and all those chats are well worth watching. Recently, as Irreal readers surely know, Wiegley was named the new Emacs maintainer so … Continue reading →

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Reporters and Encryption

Posted on 2015-12-11 by jcs

Speaking of journalists, the Columbia Journalism Review gives them a good spanking for the terrible job they’re doing in covering the encryption wars. In How not to report on the encryption ‘debate’, the CJR takes reporters to task for swallowing … Continue reading →

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Getting Started with Emacs

Posted on 2015-12-10 by jcs

Over at Coding Quark, Dhavan Vaidya has a nice post on getting started with Emacs. Rather than talk about keybindings and navigation, he concentrates on the things you should do and the resources you should read to get going with … Continue reading →

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All The Respect They Deserve

Posted on 2015-12-09 by jcs

Conan illustrates why we hold journalists in such low esteem.

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Loading Emacs Faster

Posted on 2015-12-09 by jcs

Eric Cole has an interesting post on decreasing the Emacs load time. This is not something I’ve ever worried about because I tend to load it once when the machine boots and just keep it running. It makes no difference … Continue reading →

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