Monthly Archives: July 2011

The New Luddites Redux

Posted on 2011-07-30 by jcs

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about the New Luddites—the last time was early on in my old blog (1, 2, 3)—but sadly their silliness has surfaced again. I follow Shelly Palmer’s Digital Living blog, which is geared … Continue reading →

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Scrolling With Lion

Posted on 2011-07-28 by jcs

OS X 10.7 (Lion) has been out for about a week and although that’s probably not enough time for any subtle bugs to surface, it is, apparently, enough time for my natural paranoia to be overcome by my desire to … Continue reading →

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Using set-mark-command To Remember Locations

Posted on 2011-07-27 by jcs

A couple of days ago I wrote a note to myself post to help me remember the align-regexp functionality. Today’s post is another note to myself. A recent post by Xah Lee reminded me of some Emacs functionality that I … Continue reading →

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More On Borders’ Closing

Posted on 2011-07-26 by jcs

David Hill over at Singularity Hub has an interesting take on the closing of Borders. While agreeing that Borders’ downfall is a shame, Hill argues that it will actually be a huge win for authors and readers. It will benefit … Continue reading →

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Aligning Text With Regular Expressions in Emacs

Posted on 2011-07-25 by jcs

This is really a note to myself. A while ago I ran across this post over at RAW SYNTAX about the Emacs command align-regexp. I don’t require this functionality very often but when I do, align-regexp is just what I … Continue reading →

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Traveling Without A Computer

Posted on 2011-07-23 by jcs

Heh heh. OK, that was a teaser title. Of course, I would never go anywhere without a computer; my days of being ABEND are long over. My normal routine is to take my MacBook Pro and associated equipment with me … Continue reading →

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Xah’s Challenge (Part 2)

Posted on 2011-07-21 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about Xah Lee’s programming challenge and gave a solution similar to Lee’s own. Today I will give another, possibly simpler, solution. We start with some constants and a couple of helper functions: (defconst brackets ‘((?( . ?)) … Continue reading →

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Xah’s Challenge

Posted on 2011-07-20 by jcs

A couple of days ago Xah Lee posed a programming challenge. The problem was to write a miniparser in your favorite language to detect mismatched bracketing characters in a set of text files. The set of brackets to be checked … Continue reading →

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Common iPhone Pins

Posted on 2011-07-20 by jcs

I’ve written several (1, 2, 3) posts about the analysis of passwords divulged by groups like LulzSec. The results were terrifyingly consistent: 123456 and password were almost always the most frequently used passwords. Now Daniel Amitay author of the Big … Continue reading →

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Goodbye Borders

Posted on 2011-07-19 by jcs

Although it’s a little outside of our usual subject matter, I sadly note the passing of Borders. Yesterday Borders announced that it was canceling its upcoming bankruptcy auction and liquidating the company instead. Although some creditors are objecting, it’s almost … Continue reading →

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