Category Archives: General

Tilting At Windmills

Posted on 2013-03-17 by jcs

If you enjoy charging windmills and otherwise taking on semi-hopeless causes, you might consider signing the petition to save Google Reader. So far there have been over 100,000 signers. In all honesty, it probably won’t do much good but at … Continue reading →

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Secure Communications Apps

Posted on 2013-03-16 by jcs

Over at A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering, Matthew Green has a useful review of some secure communications apps. He looks at Cryptocat Silent Circle RedPhone Wickr from the standpoint of code quality, encryption protocols, and ease of use. Interestingly, … Continue reading →

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Git-Gutter

Posted on 2013-03-15 by jcs

If you liked the functionality I described in vc-annotate, you might also like Syohei Yoshida’s git-gutter. It’s a port to Emacs of the Sublime Text plugin of the same name. The idea is that it marks changes to your files … Continue reading →

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Google To Kill Google Reader

Posted on 2013-03-14 by jcs

Google has announced that they are shutting down Google Reader in July. I spend a lot of time in Reeder, which depends on Google Reader as a backend. I’ve seen some suggestions for alternatives—NewsBlur seems to be an early favorite—but … Continue reading →

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Big Media and the User Experience

Posted on 2013-03-13 by jcs

Those of you who have been around Irreal for a while know that one of my favorite comics from The Oatmeal deals with what happens when an otherwise honest person tries to buy a video of Game of Thrones. It … Continue reading →

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Emacs 24.3

Posted on 2013-03-12 by jcs

By now you all probably know that Emacs 24.3 is out. This is a substantial release with lots of new goodies. I could write a long blog post about them but fortunately Mickey has has already done the work so … Continue reading →

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Help From Phil

Posted on 2013-03-11 by jcs

Regular reader Phil offers some help on help in the comments to the vc-annotate post. The first suggestion is something I think he’s mentioned before but that I promptly forgot. I often want to look at the source code that … Continue reading →

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Git as a Function Data Structure

Posted on 2013-03-10 by jcs

Philip Nilsson over at Jayway has an illuminating post about git. His idea is that git is best understood as a purely functional immutable data structure (like a CL list). That probably doesn’t seem very promising but he makes a … Continue reading →

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More on Quickdocs

Posted on 2013-03-09 by jcs

Recently I mentioned the Quicklisp indexing site Quickdocs. Since then, Fukamachi has continued to improve the site. He’s added categories so that you can browse the list of all libraries concerned with, say, Graphics. That gives you an idea of … Continue reading →

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Emacs: The Portable Development Environment

Posted on 2013-03-08 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about the video chat between Sacha Chua and Avdi Grimm. The take away from that post was vc-annotate, a powerful Emacs tool that hooks into your version control’s annotation facility. Right at the end of the chat—about … Continue reading →

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