Category Archives: General

The Email Self Defense Project

Posted on 2014-06-16 by jcs

The Free Software Foundation has a new project aimed at getting people to install and use email encryption software. They have published a guide and infographic that demonstrates in simple terms how (and why) to set up GnuPG and then … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Security | 3 Comments

Eshell and Abbreviations

Posted on 2014-06-13 by jcs

I’m a big fan of eshell and much prefer it to running Bash inside a terminal buffer. I like to run it full frame and wrote some code to automatically save my window configuration and then run eshell in the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

ido Completions Buffer

Posted on 2014-06-12 by jcs

I just learned something that the rest of you probably already know. Sometimes when using ido you can get a long list of candidates. Scrolling through them can be a pain. That’s helped a bit by ido-vertical-mode, which I like … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 1 Comment

Troy Hunt on the Cobra Effect

Posted on 2014-06-11 by jcs

Troy Hunt comments on that incredibly silly tweet by British Gas explaining why they disable pasting into the password field on their site. I wrote about that here. Sadly, it turns out that this practice is more widespread than I … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

Emacs and Vi

Posted on 2014-06-10 by jcs

Mike Kozlowski has a thoughtful post on the lessons of Emacs and Vi(m). His thesis is that while the lessons of Emacs have largely been absorbed by those writing editors, those of Vi have not. Emacs versus Vi is one … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs, Vim | 4 Comments

Pictures of NSA Corrupting New Networking Equipment

Posted on 2014-06-08 by jcs

We knew about the NSA’s intercepting network equipment and installing backdoor hardware before shipping it on to its intended destination. The idea, of course, was to enable easy access to networks that would otherwise hard to exploit. The NSA describes … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Privacy | Leave a comment

The PhD Movie

Posted on 2014-06-07 by jcs

If you’ve been a graduate student since the late 1990’s, you’re probably familiar with PhD Comics, a comic drawn by Jorge Cham that captures the absurdities of his graduate studies in a way that will resonate with any graduate student. … Continue reading →

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Magnar Continues His WebRebels Videos

Posted on 2014-06-06 by jcs

The estimable Magnar Sveen has, to use his words, come out of hibernation and continued the posting of his WebRebels talk. This video is part 5 of the series. It’s been a while so if you don’t remember, the official … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

Sacha Chats with Christopher Wellons

Posted on 2014-06-04 by jcs

The invaluable Sacha Chua has posted another in her series of Emacs chats. This time it’s with Christopher Wellons. As regular readers know, I’m an admirer of Wellons and have written about him several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | 2 Comments

Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth

Posted on 2014-05-31 by jcs

Over at Informit they’ve got a great Q&A with Donald Knuth. Twenty luminaries in computer science ask Knuth questions about himself, his work, and computer science. The questions are much more interesting than the usual session of this sort so … Continue reading →