Monthly Archives: November 2012

Republicans: Copyright Skeptics?

Posted on 2012-11-20 by jcs

See the afterward below for the latest information on this. Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog by conservative lawyers, Stewart Baker writes that Republicans are repudiating 40 years of tougher copyright laws. If that’s true it can only … Continue reading →

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Amazon and DRM

Posted on 2012-11-19 by jcs

Over at Attendly.com John Birmingham has a provocative article entitled When It Comes To DRM, Amazon Is A Bottom Feeding Hell Beast. That is, to put it mildly, a bit hyperbolic but Birmingham has a serious point. A point that … Continue reading →

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Xah’s Unicode Gallery

Posted on 2012-11-18 by jcs

Speaking of Unicode, as I did yesterday, Xah Lee has updated and rearranged all his pages dealing with Unicode and added a single, unified Unicode Gallery & Tutorial index page. I really like this because it provides a single page … Continue reading →

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Encodings and Unicode

Posted on 2012-11-17 by jcs

David C. Zentgraf over at Kunststube.net has a useful post about character encodings, Unicode, and UTF-X. The post is entitled What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text, which is a … Continue reading →

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Further Evidence for the Demise of Cursive

Posted on 2012-11-16 by jcs

I’ve written a couple of times about the demise of cursive handwriting. Its proponents’ arguments have pretty much been reduced to (1) it is the apotheosis of all that is good and holy in written communication and (2) if we … Continue reading →

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Some Common Sense on OOP

Posted on 2012-11-15 by jcs

A few days ago, I ran across an interesting and commonsensical article on OOP by James Hague over at programming in the twenty-first century. In it he says that while OOP is sometimes useful, it’s not a fundamental particle of … Continue reading →

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An Optimal .emacs File

Posted on 2012-11-14 by jcs

I recently stumbled across this old post from Nickel’s Worth on optimizing your .emacs file. It’s from 2009 so it is, in some parts, dated but it still contains a lot of good ideas. To me, the most controversial piece … Continue reading →

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Traveling Salesmen, NP, NP Complete, and NP Hard

Posted on 2012-11-13 by jcs

Ron Hilton over at Absolutely No Machete Juggling has an excellent post on the traveling salesman problem. Hilton explains that when people say the traveling salesman problem is NP Complete they are almost always wrong. Almost because there are two … Continue reading →

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Advanced Dired Tips

Posted on 2012-11-12 by jcs

Xah Lee has updated his Emacs Advanced dired Tips page. I thought I knew all this stuff but Lee has some tips I wasn’t aware of. For example, you can configure what dired does when you try to copy or … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp Naming Conventions

Posted on 2012-11-11 by jcs

Over at the newly redesigned Common Lisp Wiki, CLiki, they have an excellent page on Common Lisp naming conventions. Most people that have done a non-trivial amount of Lisp programming will be at least dimly aware of many of these … Continue reading →

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