Category Archives: Programming

Emacs Compilation Errors

Posted on 2012-08-12 by jcs

Over at the Definitely a plug blog there’s a very nice mini-tutorial on using the Emacs compilation facility. When you use 【Meta+x】 compile to run a compilation process, Emacs will parse the error output and allow you to step through … Continue reading →

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Reusability and NIH

Posted on 2012-08-09 by jcs

Peter Donis has a nice post discussing a programming challenge given to Knuth and critiqued by McIlroy. Don Knuth, certainly one the premier computer scientists (period) was asked to demonstrate literate programming by solving a simple problem involving finding the … Continue reading →

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Tips for Using Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2012-08-05 by jcs

Nic Ferrier has a nice post entitled Tips on Emacs Lisp programming. The post has been mentioned by many of the Emacs aggregators but it’s a nice post and worth a shout out. Ferrier takes the position that Elisp is … Continue reading →

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Prompting for User Input with Elisp

Posted on 2012-08-04 by jcs

Xah Lee has a nice tutorial on getting user input with Emacs Lisp. Most Elisp programmers are aware of the interactive control strings for this purpose and most of us probably use that for most occasions requiring user input: (defun … Continue reading →

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Diceware in Lisp

Posted on 2012-07-26 by jcs

I recently downloaded the Ironclad Cryptography Library with quicklisp and wanted to give it a spin. I thought a nice little project would be to implement the Diceware password generation algorithm in Lisp. This turned out to be really easy. … Continue reading →

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Searching for Blog Posts by Title

Posted on 2012-07-21 by jcs

Last year I wrote about how I search for a blog post’s org file by the post’s title. That involved bringing up a dired buffer for the directory containing the source org files and doing a dired-do-search for a regular … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp For Noobs

Posted on 2012-07-08 by jcs

Lori Holden over at Ghost Opera, Ltd has a nice post with advice for noobs wanting to get started with Common Lisp. As Holden points out, Common Lisp is beautiful and powerful but has some sharp edges and no commonly … Continue reading →

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Emacs Rocks! #11

Posted on 2012-07-06 by jcs

The always entertaining and informative Magnar Sveen has a new episode of Emacs Rocks! up. In Episode 11 he demonstrates swank.js a package that brings the JavaScript REPL to Emacs in much the same way that swank brings us the … Continue reading →

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The Google Billboard Puzzle

Posted on 2012-07-02 by jcs

A recent Programming Praxis problem resurrected the famous Google billboard puzzle. Back in July of 2004, Google put up billboards all over the country reading {FIRST 10-DIGIT PRIME IN CONSECUTIVE DIGITS OF E}.COM Those who solved the problem and followed … Continue reading →

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Programming Metric: -2000 LOC

Posted on 2012-07-01 by jcs

Over at Folklore, Andy Hertzfeld has a wonderful story about management’s obsession with non-sensible programming metrics. Who among us has not, at one time or another in our career, been subjected to a manager who thought that lines of code … Continue reading →

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