Category Archives: General

Keeping Your Data Safe From the NSA

Posted on 2013-06-24 by jcs

After another week of seemingly never ending revelations about government snooping into our phone calls and Web activities—you guys in Europe can stop snickering; you aren’t immune either—many of us are wondering how we can regain a modicum of privacy. … Continue reading →

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Speculative Problems

Posted on 2013-06-23 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis tweeted the perfect answer to those who complain about “problems” with Lisp syntax. The tweet was apparently provoked by this post from John Cook that, while discussing symbols in programming languages, remarked that “Lisp’s typographical monotony makes it … Continue reading →

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The Hipsters and the Designer

Posted on 2013-06-20 by jcs

Editorial note: I wrote this a few weeks ago (before WWDC) but didn’t publish it because it seemed a bit ranty. Now Apple has revealed iOS 7 and its icons and the hipsters are still yak yak yaking about them. … Continue reading →

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Quickutil

Posted on 2013-06-19 by jcs

Robert Smith and Eitarow Fukamachi have started a really interesting new project: Quickutil. The idea is to do for small Lisp utilities what Quicklisp does for Lisp libraries. Smith explains it all on his SYMBO1ICS IDEAS blog but the TL;DR … Continue reading →

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European Lisp Symposium

Posted on 2013-06-18 by jcs

Here are links to the talks from the European Lisp Symposium from this June. There were some technical problems but most of the talks were captured. These are audio links and in some cases the accompanying slides (as PDFs). If … Continue reading →

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Email and Encryption

Posted on 2013-06-16 by jcs

In view of the NSA brouhaha, I’ve been thinking about encrypted email as a first step in keeping my private business private. Like most of you, I’m the proverbial “nothing to hide” netizen but I also have an instinctive dislike … Continue reading →

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Cracking Passwords

Posted on 2013-06-15 by jcs

Last May, Ars Technica published a chilling article on password cracking that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. I urge you to take a look at it even if you’re just a user but especially if you … Continue reading →

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Marc Battyani Interview

Posted on 2013-06-13 by jcs

Vsevolod Dyomkin has another great entry in his series of interviews with Lisp hackers over at Lisp, The Universe and Everything. This time it’s with Marc Battyani, a Lisp hacker and entrepreneur whose company, NovaSparks, builds ultra-low-latency FPGA-based supercomputers for … Continue reading →

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Emacsy

Posted on 2013-06-11 by jcs

Shane Celis has announced that Emacsy was accepted as a Google Summer of Code project. Celis describes Emacsy as an embeddable Emacs-like library for non-text applications: Emacs OS without the text editor. The idea is to bring the Emacs way … Continue reading →

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Iain M. Banks, RIP

Posted on 2013-06-10 by jcs

We knew this was coming but damn!

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