List Character Sets

Posted on 2013-11-15 by jcs

I picked up a useful Emacs command from Xah Lee’s Emacs Blog. It’s from a comment by Stef on Lee’s Emacs & Unicode Tips page. It’s the list-character-sets command. When you call it, you get a list of all the character sets known to Emacs. If you select one of the sets you get a list of those characters and their hex code. Just the thing when you want to insert a little used character and can’t remember its codepoint.

It can only display one and two dimensional character sets (see the help page for more information on that) but as Stef points out unicode-bmp and unicode-sip display without problems even if unicode doesn’t. As Stef also points out, it’s very handy to figure out the font capabilities of your Emacs installation.

The never-ending Emacs adventure: there’s always something new to learn.

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Cursive Coda

Posted on 2013-11-14 by jcs

I’ve written quite a few posts about the horror that is cursive handwriting. The gist of those posts were that

  1. I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I could
  2. Cursive handwriting is dying out

Those posts stand up pretty well, I think, and now I have some company. Sacha Chua has a nice post that echos some of the same themes I wrote about in my posts. Like me, her cursive is, um, not the best and being a pragmatic woman she simply stopped using it. When she writes, as she does a lot in her sketchnotes for instance, she prints.

What’s noteworthy is that people think her handwriting is excellent. I’ve seen the same thing: people think I have excellent penmanship but that’s because I print. If they saw my cursive, they’d run screaming from the room. In a great comment to one of my posts, Kate Gladstone notes that the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive. Instead, they use what she describes as “semi-cursive” where only some letters are joined and the printed letter forms are used.

Gladstone runs a handwriting improvement service and has a lot of useful and interesting things to say about handwriting. As I’ve mentioned in my posts, the question of cursive or not invokes vehement and hostile reactions on both sides. Gladstone, unlike most people commenting on the controversy, has documentable facts on her side.

Here in the U.S., school systems are abandoning cursive in increasing numbers. I don’t know what the situation is in the Philippines where Chua learned to write but I’d be surprised if the situation is much different.

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Update on Slow Loading of Irreal

Posted on 2013-11-13 by jcs

A quick update on the Irreal loading problems. I ran a tcpdump on a typical page load of Irreal and discovered the following:

  • The initial three-way handshake with the server completes almost immediately.
  • Immediately afterwards the GET from the browser is received and the server ACKs the request.
  • Nothing happens for about 22 seconds after which the Irreal home page starts to download. The download completes within 340 ms.

Phil wrote to say that he was seeing the same thing so I’m pretty confident that the problem is in generating the content for the home page. The same thing appears to happen anytime dynamic output is generated. I don’t understand why this suddenly started happening. Some people, such as Xah Lee, say that this has been happening for a while but it’s only recently that I’ve been seeing it. The only recent change is an automatic update to the WordPress software.

In any event, my next step was to install the W3 Total Cache plugin. I’m hoping this will make things better. If you are still seeing a 20 second or more delay on downloading the home page please let me know in the comments.

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Ten Steps You Can Take to Protect Yourself from Surveillance

Posted on 2013-11-12 by jcs

The EFF has a list of ten steps you can take to protect yourself from surveillance. There’s nothing there that will come as news to the always informed Irreal reader but it’s a nice summary and worth passing on to some of your less informed friends and family.

Most of the steps are easy and something that everyone should be doing. To me, the hardest part is encrypting all your communications. The problem there is your interlocutors. It’s easy for us geeks to use GPG/PGP and some sort of secure chat but when we want to talk to Aunt Millie (or, really, most of our friends) we’re out of luck because all of that crypto stuff is too hard for them. The crucial need is for someone to figure out a way to get everyone using GPG. It’s a hard problem but I’m sure that riches and glory await the person who solves it. This is why I find the Dark Mail Alliance that I wrote about a couple of days ago such a hopeful development. They may or may not succeed but at least the problem is being worked on.

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Gnus Video Part 3

Posted on 2013-11-11 by jcs

Noufal Ibrahim over at EmacsMovies.org has his latest video up. It’s the third on his series about Gnus. In this episode, Ibrahim discusses the scoring and sorting of articles. Like almost everything in Gnus it’s extraordinarily configurable and therefore complex. As in the previous two episodes in the series, the intent is not to serve as a tutorial as much as to give us a flavor of what’s available and how it works.

The video is about 24 minutes long so you’ll need to block out some time. If you’ve been wondering what the excitement—and sometimes fear and loathing—over Gnus is about this series is definitely worth watching.

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The Dark Mail Alliance

Posted on 2013-11-10 by jcs

Here’s some rare good news from the NSA front: the Lavabit and Silent Circle teams have joined forces to form the Dark Mail Alliance. There are quite a few stories on the Internet about the alliance and what they are trying to achieve. They haven’t released the technical details yet but as far as I can tell the aim is to make email encryption transparent and also hide as much of the metadata as possible.

The protocol and associated software will be released as open source software so that anyone can use it. The more ambitious goal is to get the heavy hitters to sign up. They’d like providers like Google and Yahoo to use the system. Their ultimate goal is to have 50% of email traffic flowing through Dark Mail in 3 years. That seems ambitious to me but I sure hope they succeed.

Every time you read about email security in the press—even in the technical press—you are always warned about how difficult it is to set up PGP/GPG. That’s mostly nonsense, I think, but it is true that Aunt Millie isn’t going to bother because it’s too mysterious and too much trouble. Who’s going to spy on poor old Aunt Millie, after all? So the real hurdle to getting secure email is to make the encryption completely transparent. If Aunt Millie has to do anything extra it simply isn’t going to happen.

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Help: Irreal Loading Slowly

Posted on 2013-11-09 by jcs

For the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that Irreal has been loading slowly. Irreal, like many small WordPress blogs, runs on a virtual server and I assumed that my hosting provider was moving things around a bit and that the problem would resolve itself soon.

Then Jean-Philippe Paradis noticed that although the blog was slow to load, he could connect to irreal.org instantly. By using the Safari Timeline Recording function I can see that the problem is a ~22 second latency before the front page starts to load. Once the load starts it completes in about 300 ms. It does not appear that plugin loading or running is an issue. I did a Web search for the problem but didn’t find much. I did notice that one entry on the WordPress Forum claimed that things speeded up after the site was pinged. I tried that and sure enough the site started loading quickly again.

Rule 2 states, “There is no magic” so I’m not really believing in the magical power of ping. Because the problems started around the same time as the automatic WordPress udgrade to 3.7.1, I reloaded the update by hand. As things stand now, the site is loading normally for me.

If you find that the site is still loading slowly for you, could you please leave a comment to this post? Also, as I’ve said before, I’m really a back end guy and don’t know much about PHP or Web servers so if you have any wisdom to impart please leave a comment about that too. Thanks.

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The New Apple Mail App and GPGTools

Posted on 2013-11-09 by jcs

The other day I got a popup telling me that a new version of the OS X mail app was available to download and install. I like to keep everything up-to-date as much as possible so I clicked on “Install.” As soon as the new version started, it informed me that it was disabling the GPGTools plugin that provides GPG encryption and signing of email.

Even though I’ve yet to convince most of my interlocutors that they should install GPG or PGP, I sign all my email so this was a big deal for me. In a panic I went searching for a work around or, at least, when a fix would be ready.

Happily, it turns out the panic was unwarranted. If this happens to you all you need to do is to go to the GPGTools site and download and reinstall the package. Once I did that, everything worked again. This is true even if you are already up-to-date and are merely reinstalling the same version. As I wrote this, I checked the GPGTools support site and noticed that they now have a notice about the problem prominently displayed so this post probably won’t be as useful but perhaps it will help one of my fellow Apple users.

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Newlines in Lisp Mode

Posted on 2013-11-08 by jcs

I was lurking in a Twitter conversation between Jean-Philippe Paradis and Xah Lee and learned something new and useful. If you’re using Paredit mode, as you should be, there is a difference between 【Return】 and 【Ctrl+j】. I have 【Return】 set to newline-and-indent which is probably what most people use. If you type 【Ctrl+j】 instead, you get paredit-newline which behaves pretty much the same but instead of just indenting the new line it also indents any S-expression following the point. That’s a win and in keeping with the Paredit philosophy of working on the syntax tree rather than just text.

Here’s the example from the paredit-newline help page. First, we type 【Return】 

(let ((n (frobbotz))) |(display (+ n 1)
port))
→
(let ((n (frobbotz)))
 |(display (+ n 1)
port))

and then 【Ctrl+j】 

(let ((n (frobbotz))) |(display (+ n 1)
port))
→
(let ((n (frobbotz)))
 |(display (+ n 1)
           port))

Paradis says that it’s just as easy to type 【Ctrl+j】 as it is to type 【Return】 and that’s what he does. I’m not sure I’m trainable enough to start doing that but I could just add 

(define-key lisp-mode-shared-map (kbd "RET") 'paredit-newline)

to my init.el to get the desired result. I suppose I could also remap 【Ctrl+j】 to newline-and-indent so that I could have the old behavior if I needed it.

What are the rest of you doing? If you know about paredit-newline, are you typing 【Ctrl+j】 or have you remapped it? I really like this functionality so I’m interested in how others are invoking it.

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SBCL 1.1.13

Posted on 2013-11-07 by jcs

I forgot to mention that SBCL 1.1.13 is out and ready for download. There are some bug fixes, a few minor enhancements, and a couple of optimizations for SXHASH. You can check the release notes to see exactly what’s changed. As usual, you can get the new release at the SBCL download page.

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to build it from source each time. Unless you’re using the Linux binaries, that’s required if you want the latest release because the prebuilt binaries always lag behind on the other platforms. I was pleasantly surprised to have no problems with the build. That’s usually the case, of course, but I just upgraded to Mavericks and past major upgrades always required loading the new XCode and then getting the command line tools. This time, OS X just asked me to agree to the XCode license and then went on with the build. No muss or fuss at all. You do have to do the build with a sudo, though, because the system requires you to be root to agree to the XCode license. Presumably further builds under Mavericks won’t require root privileges.

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