Monthly Archives: January 2014

How is this Legal?

Posted on 2014-01-21 by jcs

I’m in favor of stopping botnets and all but remotely deleting old copies of Tor from users’ machines? I don’t see how Microsoft avoids law suits and criminal complaints. They doubtless have some obscure terms-of-service item covering this but if … Continue reading →

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Electric Indents

Posted on 2014-01-20 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux has another post up in his series on features of the upcoming Emacs 24.4. This time, he writes about Emacs Auto-indentation. The feature was added in Emacs 24.1 but in version 24.4 it’s enabled … Continue reading →

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Ido Vertical Mode

Posted on 2014-01-19 by jcs

A couple of days ago, I mentioned how much I’m enjoying ido-vertical-mode. I first learned about it from Sacha Chua’s chat with Magnar Sveen as I wrote about previously. Now, serendipitously, Bozhidar Batsov over at the excellent Emacs Redux is … Continue reading →

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Judge Rules Against the TSA

Posted on 2014-01-18 by jcs

Back in December, I wrote about the government’s dubious tactics aimed at preventing a woman placed on the no-fly from getting a fair trial on the matter. Because the woman is not a U.S. citizen, the government attempted to keep … Continue reading →

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Emacs Index Searching

Posted on 2014-01-17 by jcs

Xah Lee has a blog post (2014-01-16) that reminded me of two useful functions that I can never seem to remember: emacs-index-search and elisp-index-search. They allow you to look up a topic in the Emacs or Elisp manuals by querying … Continue reading →

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Schneier on the NSA Threat

Posted on 2014-01-16 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about how there is little evidence that the NSA’s mass surveillance is effective. Bruce Schneier has an interesting article up that argues it’s worse than that. Schneier says that the NSA is a threat to our security. … Continue reading →

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The Usefulness of Mass Surveillance

Posted on 2014-01-15 by jcs

Remember those 50 plus terrorist plots that the NSA mass surveillance was instrumental in stopping? You won’t be surprised to learn that that was yet another lie. Ars Technica is reporting on a New America Foundation study that examined 225 … Continue reading →

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Emacs Byte Code

Posted on 2014-01-14 by jcs

Over at null program, Christopher Wellons has an excellent post on Emacs Byte Code Internals. Most people won’t care, of course, but we’re nerds and we don’t like black boxes. As Wellons says, the byte code internals are under documented—or … Continue reading →

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Emacs Colors with OS X

Posted on 2014-01-13 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov has his third post on the features of the coming Emacs 24.4 up. This time, he discusses the addition of sRGB to the NextStep (NS) build section of Emacs. The NS build section is where all the Mac … Continue reading →

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Know Lisp, Get a Job?

Posted on 2014-01-12 by jcs

Over at the Lisp subreddit, nhs111throwaway asks if anyone actually got a job because they know Lisp. The problem with a question like that is that you’re going to get only anecdotal information as answers. Still, it’s interesting to read … Continue reading →

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