Category Archives: General

SBCL 1.1.1 Is Out

Posted on 2012-11-03 by jcs

Steel Bank Common Lisp 1.1.1 is out. As usual, compilation and installation were a snap. Out of irrational paranoia I always run the verification tests after I compile. Of course, everything was fine: all the tests except those expected to … Continue reading →

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Elnode Video

Posted on 2012-11-02 by jcs

Nic Ferrier’s Elnode project is a great example of the power that Emacs and Emacs Lisp can deliver. Its almost unbelievable that you can run a Web server inside Emacs, but that’s what Elnode does. Once again we see in … Continue reading →

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Recursive Input to query-replace

Posted on 2012-11-01 by jcs

The other day I needed to change all occurrences of a certain Unicode character with another in a large file. No problem, I thought, I’ll just fire off a query-replace and be done. Of course, now I had to enter … Continue reading →

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Securing WordPress Sites

Posted on 2012-10-31 by jcs

WordPress.tv has an interesting video by Chris Wiegman of bit51 entitled Securing WordPress is Easier Than Making Coffee. If you have a WordPress site this is worth an hour of your time. He begins by showing how a seemingly trivial … Continue reading →

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Remapping the Caps Lock Key

Posted on 2012-10-30 by jcs

Read any article on optimizing your workflow with Emacs and odds are the first recommendation is to remap 【caps lock】 to 【Ctrl】. For as long as I can remember, the first thing I’ve done when setting up a new machine … Continue reading →

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More on Setting the Emacs Frame Height

Posted on 2012-10-29 by jcs

I got some really great comments to my Setting An Emacs Per-System Height post. If you are interested in automatically sizing your Emacs frames you should definitely take a look at them. Not all the suggestions are OS X specific … Continue reading →

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Turning Off Native OS X Scrolling for Emacs

Posted on 2012-10-28 by jcs

One of the minor annoyances of Emacs on the Mac is that it’s easy to inadvertently scroll an Emacs window even if Emacs doesn’t have focus. Usually this happens when I’m working in a browser or in Reeder and I … Continue reading →

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Setting An Emacs Per-System Height

Posted on 2012-10-27 by jcs

Every time I start Emacs I have to adjust the frame size. That’s because my two main systems are a 15 inch MacBook Pro and a 27 inch iMac. In both cases I want the width to be 80 cols … Continue reading →

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Xah Lee on Crypto

Posted on 2012-10-26 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice digest (heh!) of the various cryptography algorithms used on the Web. It’s not a detailed technical picture—there are plenty of those available—but, rather, a short explanation of each of the major algorithms and how they … Continue reading →

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Storing Passwords Securely 2

Posted on 2012-10-25 by jcs

A few days ago, I wrote about the Stormpath Video on how to secure passwords. Now Stormpath has published a blog post that covers the same material. This is good stuff and if you’re working on a site that handles … Continue reading →

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