Category Archives: General

Forensics with DRAKMA

Posted on 2012-08-11 by jcs

I ran across the Open States Website, which provides information on legislative activity for many (and eventually all) of the U.S. states. They have an API that allows you to query information via http and get answers formatted as JSON. … Continue reading →

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Now Let’s All Enjoy A Moment of Schadenfreude

Posted on 2012-08-10 by jcs

ZDNet is reporting that SCO is in Chapter 7 and thus effectively dead. They’ve been in Chapter 11 since 2007 and really had no hope of getting out so this news is not surprising. Those of us with memories of … Continue reading →

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Even The New York Times Is Getting A Clue

Posted on 2012-08-08 by jcs

The New York Times Sunday Review has an interesting article on piracy. They invoke the common metaphor of Whac-A-Mole and conclude that Internet piracy is not going away and that the content industry is fooling themselves to believe otherwise. They … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Configuration File

Posted on 2012-08-07 by jcs

Xah Lee has an interesting post on organizing your emacs init file in which he advocates breaking your .emacs or init.el file into several subfiles. Generally when people do this they organize the subfiles by category or function—all the items … Continue reading →

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The Dropbox Breakin

Posted on 2012-08-06 by jcs

Much is being made of the supposed Dropbox break in. Several users reported that they started receiving spam at email addresses that were only used with their Dropbox accounts. Dropbox, to their credit, immediately launched an investigation and brought in … Continue reading →

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A New PDF Version of SICP

Posted on 2012-08-03 by jcs

Long time readers know of my love affair with Abelson & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I regard it as certainly one of the best and arguably the best computer science books ever written. MIT Press, in a … Continue reading →

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Building ELPA Packages

Posted on 2012-08-02 by jcs

I’ve written about ELPA from the user’s viewpoint a couple of times. If you’re an Elisp developer and want to get your project into ELPA or Marmalade, Nic Ferrier has a nice post that details the steps. This is a … Continue reading →

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Twenty Years of Vim

Posted on 2012-08-01 by jcs

Ars Technica has a nice article on the twentieth anniversary of that other editor. Worth a read even if you aren’t a vi(m) enthusiast. One fact that I didn’t know—even after years and years of being a vi/vim user—is that … Continue reading →

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Malware Prophylaxis

Posted on 2012-07-30 by jcs

After last week’s malware outbreak at Irreal I’ve been thinking about ways to prevent another episode. For those who haven’t been following along, someone managed to add a line of obfuscated PHP to the index.php file that gets things going … Continue reading →

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Does Anyone Really Think This Is A Problem?

Posted on 2012-07-29 by jcs

Oliver Reichenstein over at the iA has a strange post/article positing that nested directories are hard to understand. Reichenstein celebrates the iOS/Mountain Lion approach to file systems in which directories can be at most one level deep (and even that … Continue reading →

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