Category Archives: General

The Logical Conclusion

Posted on 2014-08-03 by jcs

I’ve been writing, recently, about surveillance abuses in the United States. Just in case my European pals are imagining that this is an NSA problem that mainly concerns America with a few residual casualties in Europe, consider this logical conclusion … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Medal for Edward Snowden

Posted on 2014-08-03 by jcs

Jon Evans over at TechCrunch makes the case that America should give Edward Snowden a medal. To many, of course, that’s a non-starter; Snowden is the ultimate traitor doing his best to harm his country. Cooler heads, including Evans, are … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Spying on the Senate

Posted on 2014-08-02 by jcs

Last March, I wrote about revelations that the CIA was spying on the U.S. Senate. At the time, CIA head John Brennan denied the allegation and heaped scorn on the very idea. Now, Brennan has admitted that, well yes, they … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Programmers’ Fonts

Posted on 2014-08-01 by jcs

The other day I wrote about Emacs themes. It’s amazing how much difference a well chosen theme can make to your peace of mind and productivity. Just as important is the choice of a programming font. Fortunately, Emacs can support … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

DWIM Narrowing

Posted on 2014-07-31 by jcs

The other day I saw a nice bit of code from Michael Fogelman that implemented a “do what I mean narrowing” function. That seemed pretty neat and I made a mental note to add it to my init.el. Then Artur … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs Autoloads

Posted on 2014-07-29 by jcs

Over at lunarsite, Sebastian Wiesner has a very nice post that explains the ins and outs of autoloads in Emacs lisp. Mostly, autoloads take care of themselves but sometimes users do need to interact with them. Here’s an example that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

git-timemachine

Posted on 2014-07-28 by jcs

Recently, I’ve seen several references to the git-timemachine package. It didn’t seem that interesting to me so I ignored it. Then I noticed that Bozhidar Batsov is recommending it on Emacs Redux. When Batsov recommends something, it’s generally an indication … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 1 Comment

News on the Jewel v. NSA Case

Posted on 2014-07-27 by jcs

Here in the United States, the EFF is prosecuting a suit on the NSA’s indiscriminate collection of Americans’ private digital communications. In 2008 they filed the Jewel v. NSA case alleging that the NSA’s wholesale vacuuming up of Americans’ communications … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Quantum Theory and Computational Complexity

Posted on 2014-07-26 by jcs

The Physics arXiv Blog has a really interesting article about the connection between quantum theory and the question of whether or not P = NP. The article starts with the question of why we can’t observe quantum phenomena at the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

Emacs Themes

Posted on 2014-07-24 by jcs

I started using Emacs before there was any real support for themes so I just selected the default light configuration. I made a few tweaks like making the cursor a red bar but didn’t do much fiddling otherwise. About three … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment