Monthly Archives: February 2012

Not Macros; Read

Posted on 2012-02-18 by jcs

James Long has an interesting post up at his blog entitled Lisp: It’s Not About Macros, It’s About Read in which he argues that what makes Lisp so powerful is not really macros but the read function. The reason for … Continue reading →

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(Re)Naming Functions

Posted on 2012-02-17 by jcs

This is another note to myself. Quite often we want to give a function another name. Sometimes this is because we want a shorter name for a function that we use a lot. For example, even though I use smex … Continue reading →

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Generalized Variables and Macros 2

Posted on 2012-02-16 by jcs

Yesterday we talked about some of the difficulties in using setf in a macro and how these difficulties can sometimes be overcome by using the mysterious define-modify-macro. Today, I want to look at a more general approach that will also … Continue reading →

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Generalized Variables and Macros 1

Posted on 2012-02-15 by jcs

One of the wonders of Common Lisp is the generalized variable. Roughly speaking, a generalized variable is an expression that can serve as the first argument to setf. The official explanation, as given in Common Lisp the Language, 2ed., is … Continue reading →

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Some RSA Public Keys Are Insecure

Posted on 2012-02-14 by jcs

According to The New York Times, a team of European and American researchers have discovered that some (about 0.2%) RSA public keys are insecure. The insecurity is the result of using prime factors that aren’t cryptographically random. I’m still reading … Continue reading →

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UTF-8 Characters In Emacs

Posted on 2012-02-11 by jcs

I’ve mentioned several times that I use Xah Lee’s excellent HTML/XML Entities List page to look up the code points for UTF-8 characters that I sometimes use in my blog posts. For example, in writing about Emacs Registers I wrote … Continue reading →

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Centering Text In Emacs

Posted on 2012-02-09 by jcs

I was watching another one of Kurt Schwehr’s Emacs videos and came across something I didn’t know (or at least something I’d forgotten). You can center text on the line with 【Meta+o Meta+s】. By default it will center the line … Continue reading →

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More Org Header Searching

Posted on 2012-02-08 by jcs

The little Org-mode header searching functions that I wrote about in Finding Org Headers And Links turned out to be pretty useful so I added another one. This function is like find-all-org-headers except that it limits the search to those … Continue reading →

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A Short Coda To Yesterday’s Post

Posted on 2012-02-07 by jcs

Yesterday I wrote about Finding Org Headers And Links and gave some Elisp functions to aid in searching for them. Today, my bank statement came and I entered information from the statement into my Org tax file. The tax file … Continue reading →

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Org Mode Video

Posted on 2012-02-07 by jcs

Looking through the ErgoEmacs Google+ Page, I found this post about Kurt Schwehr’s video on Org Mode. It’s a nice video that covers some of the basics of Org Mode and Babel. It’s just shy of 30 minutes so he … Continue reading →

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