Monthly Archives: April 2013

The Worst Password Tips

Posted on 2013-04-20 by jcs

Mark Burnnet has an interesting post on The Worst Password Tips. His main thesis is that much—or even most—of the advice you hear about choosing passwords is no longer good advice. It used to be that passwords like p@r013 gave … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Security | 3 Comments

Tags with Emacs

Posted on 2013-04-19 by jcs

One of the oldest and most general code navigation tools is tags. The idea is that you generate a tags database for your code base and then use it to tell your editor where to find the definition of a … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

Outage Status Update and After Action Report

Posted on 2013-04-18 by jcs

I’m happy to report that I can again log into the administrative page. I’ve released everything in the moderation queue and cleaned up a bit of a mess that I left while I was trying to figure out how to … Continue reading →

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A Simple Explanation of One-Way Functions and Their Application to Passwords

Posted on 2013-04-17 by jcs

John Graham-Cumming has a very nice 4-part series on one-way functions and their application to passwords. The explanation is completely non-mathematical and should be understandable by anyone. By the end of the third post, Graham-Cumming has explained how a simple … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Security | Leave a comment

My Solution to the Elisp Challenge

Posted on 2013-04-16 by jcs

Here’s my solution to the recent Elisp challenge. It’s easy to be seduced by the notion of rotating one sequence to see if it’s equal to the other. That would work but the rotation is pretty expensive and the solution … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Tagged Emacs, Emacs-lisp | Leave a comment

Paredit and Multiple Cursors

Posted on 2013-04-15 by jcs

Brian Zwahr has an outstanding Emacs Rocks! type video up on using Paredit and Multiple Cursors together. This is excellent. He shows how to combine simple functions from each into a really powerful tool. Like Sveen’s masterpieces, the video is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Emacs | Leave a comment

Outage Status

Posted on 2013-04-14 by jcs

I still can’t reach the administrative page so I assume the WordPress attacks are ongoing. That’s annoying but at least I’ve figured out how to push new posts. That still leaves those comments stuck in moderation, of course, but all … Continue reading →

Posted in Administrivia | Leave a comment

My Solution to EmacsGolf 3

Posted on 2013-04-14 by jcs

Here’s my solution to the EmacsGolf 3 challenge. When I first saw Saul’s post, the first thing that popped into my mind was that this is the classic use case for a keyboard macro. The only problem is that each … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged General | Leave a comment

Still More Information on the Outage

Posted on 2013-04-13 by jcs

Here’s another article on the ongoing attack on WordPress sites that helps explain what’s going on. From the description of the attack, I think Irreal is pretty safe since we don’t use stupid passwords but who knows. When all this … Continue reading →

Posted in Administrivia | Leave a comment

More Information on the Outage

Posted on 2013-04-13 by jcs

Apparently, this is what’s going on that’s causing the problems with Irreal. It looks as if all WordPress sites are getting hit. I’ll post more information as it becomes available. Let’s hope this latest round of silliness ends soon.