Monthly Archives: July 2013

Tail Call Optimization in Lisp Implementations

Early on in my Lisp education, I learned Scheme and became enamored with using recursion as a primary iteration strategy. It’s hard to avoid this in Scheme because it doesn’t have any other general recursion mechanisms besides do. In Common … Continue reading

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The Last Word on XML

Jean-Philippe Paradis has a pithy evaluation of XML.

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Making My Email Safer

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been looking for ways to tighten up my email security and, at the same time, move away from Google to avoid being caught in another nasty surprise like the shuttering of Google Reader. Today’s post … Continue reading

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Making DuckDuckGo Your Default Safari Search Engine

Editorial Note: You probably won’t care about this post unless you’re a Mac user but all readers are welcome. In my continuing quest for a smaller (visible) footprint on the Net, I’ve stopped using Google and switched to DuckDuckGo for … Continue reading

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Doing It Right, ISP Edition

I wish these guys were my ISP. Although it won’t be news to Irreal’s European readers, Americans may not be aware that British PM David Cameron is pushing a plan to have ISPs filter pornography. Originally, the plan called for … Continue reading

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A Patent Win

This is so cool. Joel Spolsky tells how he shot down a garbage software patent with only a 15 minute effort. He did that by using his new Stack Exchange site Ask Patents, a site on which anyone, including patent … Continue reading

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Printing From ibuffer

Ever since I remapped Caps Lock to Control I occasionally type 【Shift+X】 instead of 【Ctrl+X】 or vice-versa. Usually this doesn’t make much difference but when I’m in an ibuffer list it invariably causes havoc. The problem normally happens like this: … Continue reading

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So Close Yet So Far

Crap.

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Credit Card Numbers and Lazy Programmers

Ben, over at Brush Technology, has a splendid rant on something that I’ve written about before on my old blog. Why, in 2013, are we still suffering Websites that refuse to accept spaces in credit card numbers? There really is … Continue reading

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EmacsMovies Looks at Gnus—Part 2

Noufal Ibrahim has part 2 of his series on Gnus up. The screencast is about 30 minutes so he broke it into two videos. As with part 1, the screen is too small to be read comfortably, even on my … Continue reading

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