Category Archives: General

A Simple Explanation of One-Way Functions and Their Application to Passwords

Posted on 2013-04-17 by jcs

John Graham-Cumming has a very nice 4-part series on one-way functions and their application to passwords. The explanation is completely non-mathematical and should be understandable by anyone. By the end of the third post, Graham-Cumming has explained how a simple … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Paredit and Multiple Cursors

Posted on 2013-04-15 by jcs

Brian Zwahr has an outstanding Emacs Rocks! type video up on using Paredit and Multiple Cursors together. This is excellent. He shows how to combine simple functions from each into a really powerful tool. Like Sveen’s masterpieces, the video is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

My Solution to EmacsGolf 3

Posted on 2013-04-14 by jcs

Here’s my solution to the EmacsGolf 3 challenge. When I first saw Saul’s post, the first thing that popped into my mind was that this is the classic use case for a keyboard macro. The only problem is that each … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

More Information on the Outage

Posted on 2013-04-13 by jcs

Apparently, this is what’s going on that’s causing the problems with Irreal. It looks as if all WordPress sites are getting hit. I’ll post more information as it becomes available. Let’s hope this latest round of silliness ends soon.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Outage 2

Posted on 2013-04-13 by jcs

OK, I guess that worked. I had to rename the post file so that it didn’t get stuck in the queue but at least I was able to get it pushed out. Also, I forgot to mention that there is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Back of the Envelope Calculations

Posted on 2013-04-13 by jcs

I love this. I’m a big believer in the utility of making back of the envelope calculations. It’s amazing how often it can reveal poor assumptions or that someone is trying to peddle malarkey. The technique is also extremely powerful. … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Window Configuration and Management

Posted on 2013-04-12 by jcs

Xah Lee has a couple of nice posts on managing window configurations. One posts deals with having a single (large) frame and dividing it into several windows. The other deals with the opposite case of having several frames with one … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 12 Comments

Babcore

Posted on 2013-04-10 by jcs

Arne Babenhauserheide, who you may remember as the “Eminent Babenhauserheide” from Episode 7 of Emacs Rocks!, has a nice post up on Babcore, his version of Bozhidar Batsov’s prelude. If, like me, you enjoy mining other people’s configurations for ideas … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs Conference Videos

Posted on 2013-04-09 by jcs

The indefatigable Sacha Chua volunteered to edit the videos of the recent Emacs Conference and I’ve been looking forward to watching them. The problem was that I haven’t been able to find a list of those ready for viewing. Until … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

EmacsGolf 3

Posted on 2013-04-08 by jcs

It’s been a while since we’ve had a EmacsGolf challenge but I just ran across this post from Cameron Saul with the perfect problem for us. Here’s the problem: Saul is writing some Java code that looks like this TextView … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | 3 Comments