Category Archives: Programming

Automating Git Bisect

Posted on 2014-07-07 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of times about Git bisect. It’s a way of finding the commit that introduced an error. It works by (essentially) doing a binary search on the commit history. Now, Curtis Poe over at Ovid shows us … Continue reading →

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Reflections on Trusting Trust

Posted on 2014-07-06 by jcs

A reference to Ken Thompson’s fantastic paper Reflections on Trusting Trust popped up yesterday on Hacker News. I’ve written about this paper before but it deserves a periodic mention. If you haven’t read this paper before, I urge you in … Continue reading →

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(Lots of) Stuff You Didn’t Know About Emacs and Unicode

Posted on 2014-07-03 by jcs

Christopher Wellons has another great post on the minutia of Emacs. This time it’s about Emacs unicode pitfalls. Most of us know that Emacs uses UTF-8 as its internal data representation but little more. That’s mostly Okay because almost all … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.1

Posted on 2014-07-01 by jcs

The monthly release of Steel Bank Common Lisp is out. As usual, it compiled and loaded without mishap. Unfortunately, Slime wouldn’t compile due to a missing slot in the SBCL VM module. I can call it from the command line … Continue reading →

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The Last Line Effect

Posted on 2014-06-15 by jcs

Andrey Karpov has an interesting post that explores a surprising conclusion. Karpov studies errors in computer code professionally for his company Viva64. The company makes the static code analysers PVS-Studio and CppCat. Karpov studies different code bases and writes about … Continue reading →

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The Unix Repository Project

Posted on 2014-06-14 by jcs

I’m a big believer in the notion that one of the best ways to become a master programmer is to study the code of those who already are. There was a time when that was a lot harder than it … Continue reading →

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Removing Repeated Occurrences of a Target Character From a String

Posted on 2014-06-09 by jcs

The Problem While I was going through my RSS feed the other day, I came across this Programming Praxis problem and thought right away that the solution called for a state machine. It’s one of those problems that seems easy … Continue reading →

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Mutable String and Emacs Buffer Passing Style

Posted on 2014-06-05 by jcs

Speaking of Christopher Wellons, he’s got a very interesting post over at null program on mutable strings and Emacs buffer passing style. Wellons starts by pointing out that strings in Emacs Lisp, like many other languages, have a fixed size … Continue reading →

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Grant Rettke’s Take on Narrowing to Multiple Regions

Posted on 2014-06-03 by jcs

Grant Rettke has his own take on a function to enable narrowing to multiple regions of a buffer. I learned about the idea from comments to a post on another matter and wrote about it here. Rettke takes the example … Continue reading →

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Turning On Undo in a Temporary Buffer

Posted on 2014-06-02 by jcs

Today I learned something new from a short post on Xah Lee’s blog. The idea is that you’ve written a command that generates output in a temporary buffer and you want to enable the undo function for the buffer so … Continue reading →

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