Daring Fireball Demolishes a Particularly Silly Article

Posted on 2015-08-26 by jcs

Irreal readers know I like and use Apple products but I’m not a paid up member of the cult so I seldom write about the subject. The most fascinating thing about Apple, I think, is the derangement syndrome that it induces in many journalists. Some of the most entertaining articles I read are the Macalope’s merciless mocking of those journalists.

Over at Tech Crunch Jon Evans has a particularly silly article warning us that we shouldn’t use Apple’s products. Why? Well, because Apple makes it hard to jailbreak iOS devices and sometime in the future they might decide—despite their history of protecting their customers’ privacy—to get in bed with the NSA and other snoopers and then where would we be?

I couldn’t begin to adequately mock this nonsense but fortunately I don’t have to. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball does an excellent and entertaining job of debunking it for me. The Macalope hasn’t yet turned his antlers on Evans but I’m sure he will and I’m sure the result will also be amusing.

There are probably good arguments for why someone might prefer to use Android devices over iOS devices but Evans sure hasn’t given us one. If you want to make the argument, at least be serious.

Update before publication: That didn’t take long. Here’s the Macalope with a righteous takedown of Evans’ silliness.

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Artur Malabarba Tells it Like it is

Posted on 2015-08-25 by jcs

Who can argue?

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Converting from Word to Org

Posted on 2015-08-25 by jcs

In a comment to one of my recent posts (1, 2) on converting from Org mode to Word doc format, Grant Rettke pointed me to an interesting Org Mode mailing list thread on how academics leverage Org mode for writing their research articles. It’s a great thread and if you have a need to convert your Org documents to doc format, it’s definitely worth reading.

One problem that arises when collaborating with a Word-using colleague is that they will want to turn on tracking and make their changes and comments directly in the document. You can, of course, simply copy the changes back into your Org document but that’s a hassle. Happily, in one of the posts, Ken Mankoff outlines a method for getting those changes back into your Org document. Rettke captures the method in a recent post on his blog.

Once you have the Org document with the changes, you can do an ediff with the original to chose the changes you want to keep. For more on that idea, see Mickey Petersen’s post on writing a book with Emacs. He didn’t use Org mode but he did deal with integrating editorial changes back into his master file.

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Safe at Last

Posted on 2015-08-24 by jcs

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Karl Voit Lightning Talk

Posted on 2015-08-24 by jcs

PIM export Karl Voit gave a lightning talk on Org Mode at the recent Chaos Computer Club Camp2015. Being a lightning talk is was pretty short. That’s too bad, I would have liked it to be a bit longer.

The talk was designed to be an introduction to Org mode so if you’re already a user you may be familiar with most of what Voit has to say. On the other hand, he explains how to use blockers and triggers in your TODO lists, which is something I didn’t know. Even if you’re an expert, you’ll enjoy Voit’s enthusiasm for Org mode. As he says, there’s nothing better for personal information management.

The talk starts at 1 hour 14 minutes so just advance to that time if you aren’t interested in the other talks.

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Schneier on Going Dark

Posted on 2015-08-23 by jcs

There’s been an alarming increase in Law Enforcement’s campaigning for mandatory backdoors in communication software. They are increasingly taking their case “to the people” with dishonest Op Eds intended to induce fear of terrorism and the other four horsemen.

Bruce Schneier, an actual expert on these matters, explains why even if Law Enforcement got their backdoors it would only make the terrorism problem worse. His article has links to some of the nonsense that the FBI and others are pushing so you can see what they’re saying. Sadly, you may read Schneier’s piece but most of the people being subjected to the onslaught won’t so they’ll be getting only the lies and distortions.

You may want to read the article following the one above as well. It talks further about the war of words raging between Law Enforcement and the tech community. Both are from Schneier’s Crypto-Gram, a monthly newsletter on security matters. If you’re interested in the area you should definitely subscribe. It’s free and always has lots of good material.

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Super- and Sub-Word

Posted on 2015-08-22 by jcs

I’ve blogged about this before but here’s a handy chart to server as a reminder:

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The Network is Hostile

Posted on 2015-08-22 by jcs

Matthew Green over at Cryptography Engineering has a depressing piece on the security status of the network. He says that the network is hostile and that that hostility is baked in by its design. Our packets travel through routers and intermediate machines that we have no control over and, indeed, we usually don’t even know what machines or routers those packets pass through.

The situation is now known to be even worse than we thought. On August 15th, ProPublica published an article revealing AT&T’s almost complete capitulation to the whims of the NSA. That includes allowing them to tie into and monitor major fiber-optic cables. The NSA, in internal documents, praised AT&T’s extreme willingness to help them. Matt Blaze sums up the situation nicely in this tweet

This hostility means that ubiquitous encryption is an absolute necessity but even that, Green says, isn’t enough because current protocols leak a lot of metadata that can be revealing to those who wish to mind our business. The NSA, Green reminds us, isn’t the only state-operated entity that’s interested in and has the capability to monitor our communications. Some are even worse than the NSA.

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I Want One

Posted on 2015-08-21 by jcs

Some good advice from Troy Hunt:

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Calc Tutorial Video

Posted on 2015-08-21 by jcs

Karthik C has a very nice video entitled Emacs-Calc: The Poor Man’s Mathematica. It’s a tutorial on some of the features of Emacs calc. He begins by covering the basic stack machine nature of calc and how to perform simple calculations. He quickly covers some—but by no means all—of the vector calculations, and then moves on to symbolic computations.

He shows to to symbolically solve various types of equations. This is tremendously powerful and mirrors the capabilities of Mathematica. He also demonstrates how to do symbolic differentiation and integration. Finally, he shows how to solve numerically when a symbolic solution is not available.

The video is just short of 49 minutes and covers a lot of ground but it still only scratches the surface. It’s a really great introduction to what calc can do and even if you don’t remember everything he shows you, the help system will remind you of the commands once you tell it what you want to do.

I use calc all the time but mostly for simple calculations so it’s nice to have a video that reminds me of some of its more complicated capabilities. Of course, the manual is very complete if you need in-depth information. If you’re just starting, you’ll want Sue D Nymme’s quick reference guide. It far and away the best quick reference for calc.

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