Monthly Archives: March 2014

Senator Feinstein in High Dudgeon

Posted on 2014-03-12 by jcs

I know I mentioned it before, but this is just too hilarious to let pass unremarked. Senator Dianne Feinstein who has consistently dismissed objections to our government spying on its citizens is up in arms about the Government spying on … Continue reading →

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The Security of the Apple Keychain

Posted on 2014-03-11 by jcs

TidBITS has a great post on how Apple secures the iCloud keychain. An Apple device will remember passwords to sites you visit, WiFi nodes you join, and many other things. If you don’t do anything special, these credentials will be … Continue reading →

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Common Lisp Reader Macros

Posted on 2014-03-10 by jcs

Chaitanya Gupta has posted a nice introduction to reader macros. The conventional wisdom is that reader macros are ripe for abuse and many experts recommend avoiding them. Still, there are times when they solve a legitimate problem1 and in those … Continue reading →

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Me Neither

Posted on 2014-03-09 by jcs

Personally, I don't get the excitement surrounding #atomio, but I guess no editor can impress you after a decade spent in #Emacs. — Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) February 27, 2014

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Sauce for the Gander

Posted on 2014-03-08 by jcs

I don’t understand why they’re so upset. After all, if they have nothing to hide…

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Fixing the Emacs distnoted Problem on OS X 10.9

Posted on 2014-03-07 by jcs

With Emacs 24.3 (and possibly earlier versions) under OS X 10.9 there is a nasty problem that causes distnoted, the OS X distributed notifications daemon, to periodically suck up processor resources and basically tie up the machine. Sometimes it recovers … Continue reading →

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HTML as an STD?

Posted on 2014-03-06 by jcs

The LA Times has a surprising revelation about Americans’ beliefs. You might find their views extreme but are they wrong? As far as HTML is concerned, maybe they’re on to something. We geeks live in our own cocoon and sometimes … Continue reading →

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Dual_EC_DRBG Expalined

Posted on 2014-03-05 by jcs

Irreal readers are doubtless familiar with the broad outlines of the NSA’s insertion of a backdoor into the NIST Special Publication 800-90A elliptic curve random bit generator but may be unfamiliar about what was actually involved. Now Mother Jones has … Continue reading →

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Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Government to Collect Information About You

Posted on 2014-03-04 by jcs

This is why you shouldn’t trust the government to build databases about their citizens. At the link, Charlie Stross talks about the growing scandal in the UK concerning the NHS medical records of every citizen in the United Kingdom. Read … Continue reading →

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Outage

Posted on 2014-03-03 by jcs

And, we’re back. Sorry for the outage. Apparently my hosting provider had a series of drive failures that overwhelmed their RAID system. One of the servers affected runs the database for Irreal. My provider is very proactive and has been … Continue reading →

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