Monthly Archives: January 2022

Red Meat Friday: SICP in JavaScript

Posted on 2022-01-21 by jcs

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I declared No. Just no? Well, here’s another, even more emphatic, refusal to accept the apocalypse. No. Just HELL no! The thing about SICP is how simple and beautiful the code is and … Continue reading →

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Automating Your Job

Posted on 2022-01-20 by jcs

One of my favorite bits of—obviously apocryphal—Lisp folklore is the story of the invention of macros. The TL;DR is a that some senior Lisp developers got tired of writing the same boilerplate code all the time so that started using … Continue reading →

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Corner Quotes

Posted on 2022-01-19 by jcs

John D. Cook has a useful post on using “corner quotes” (⌜ ⌟) to delimit regular expressions in text. As Cook says, it makes a lot of sense especially when the regular expression begins or ends with a space. Cook’s … Continue reading →

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The UK Plans an Anti-encryption Campaign

Posted on 2022-01-18 by jcs

Rolling Stone has an article on a planned UK Campaign against end-to-end encryption. Of course, after the University of Virginia rape story debacle, everything they report should be viewed, um, critically. That said, the story is disturbing. The Home Office … Continue reading →

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Users Sue PayPal

Posted on 2022-01-17 by jcs

I love the idea of PayPal: a neutral broker that holds funds involved in online purchases until both sides have fulfilled their obligations. The buyer sends the funds for a purchase to PayPal, which tells the seller it has the … Continue reading →

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Exporting Variables From Org-mode to LaTeX

Posted on 2022-01-16 by jcs

Franco Pasut has posted on exporting variables from Org to LaTeX. The TL;DR is that you can define LaTeX macros defining a variable value in #+LATEX_HEADER: entries at the top of the Org file and then interpolate the variables in … Continue reading →

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Source Block Executors

Posted on 2022-01-15 by jcs

Isa Mert Gurbuz (isamert) has a very interesting post on using Org Babel to interactively deal with Web APIs. Starting with Zweifisch’s ob-http, he queries a site and gets some JSON returned. The ob-http code even allows you to pipe … Continue reading →

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Encoding, Encryption, and Hashing

Posted on 2022-01-14 by jcs

Encoding, encryption, and hashing: those are three different things only loosely connected. It never occurred to me that anyone in our tribe wouldn’t understand the difference among them but according to Eric Mann there is confusing about them. Mann has … Continue reading →

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Blocking Apple’s Private Relay

Posted on 2022-01-13 by jcs

Fortunately for those of you who don’t follow the sturm and drang of the endless Internet melodrama, Irreal has your back and follows it so you don’t have to. The latest contretemps involves carriers blocking, or threatening to block, or … Continue reading →

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The Second Emacs 28 Pretest

Posted on 2022-01-12 by jcs

Some more splendid news from the Emacs front: the second Emacs 28 pretest is out. There’s a lot of great features coming in Emacs 28 so please give it all the testing you can. It always seems as if progress … Continue reading →

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