The New Yorker and GNU

Posted on 2015-03-21 by jcs

The New Yorker is celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the GNU manifesto with a nice article on RMS and his work on Free Software. All-in-all it’s a pretty good article considering that it’s appearing in a non-technical venue. They get some details wrong but are mostly accurate.

My main complaint is that their description of Stallman and his foibles sometimes borders on a characterization. For example, in speaking of the advice that gets sent to those hosting a Stallman talk, they mention without comment that one of the items is “don’t give him a parrot.” That makes RMS seem a little loony but in fact the advice comes because he really enjoys parrots and this causes some people to want to give him one. Parrots are long lived and RMS doesn’t want to take on a pet that may outlive him. It’s perfectly reasonable when put in context.

My other complaint is that they attempt to cast him as a left-wing warrior rather than the hacker and free software advocate that he is. To be sure, Stallman does have beliefs that could be characterized as “left-wing” but I don’t think anyone who’s familiar with him and his work think of him in those terms.

Those nits aside, it’s a nice article and especially useful for our younger colleagues who may not know the story about the GNU manifesto and how it came about.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Yet Another Reason…

Posted on 2015-03-20 by jcs

… I’ve got to learn calc:

I keep finding more reasons I should spend some time on learning calc. Mostly I just bring up a Lisp REPL when I want to perform non-trivial calculations but this may be a lighter weight solution for some uses.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 3 Comments

JS;DR

Posted on 2015-03-19 by jcs

An idea whose time has come. I have nothing against using Javascript to provide enhanced navigation and things like menus but if the site won’t render without it, there’s a problem.

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Tips on Everyday Emacs Use

Posted on 2015-03-19 by jcs

Daniel Ehrman has a nice post on 11 tips for solving everyday editing problems with Emacs. The list is a must-read for Emacs n00bs but even experienced Emacsers might benefit by being reminded of a few of the tips.

I like posts like this because I often learn something but also because it’s interesting to see what others think are important techniques for Emacs use. They often suggest new workflows, something that I’m always on the lookout for. It’s a reasonably short post and well worth a look.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Literate DevOps

Posted on 2015-03-18 by jcs

As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of reproducible research. It makes it possible for anyone—even yourself—to reproduce all the steps of your research exactly as you performed it. A related concept, termed Literate DevOps by Howard Abrams, does the same thing for the building of deployment images.

The idea is that you can set up your system on a virtual machine and build the final system there. If you capture your steps as you go, you can then recreate the environment on the production server and perhaps recreate it on a virtual machine again to troubleshoot problems that come up during production.

There are tools such as puppet or chef that automate the deployment of systems and Abrams’ idea is that you use literate devops to build the recipes used by those tools. Abrams shows how to capture your steps, including the code, in an Org mode file. It’s possible to build the VM and then log into it from an Org mode code block. He shows how to you can arrange things so that the code blocks will be executed in the VM (or other external machine) right from an Org mode file on your local workstation. There’s a ton of interesting ideas in his post and it’s well worth a read.

Over at analogpixel there’s another nice post on the same subject that takes a slightly different approach. Rather than execute the code directly from Org mode, he uses the Org tangle command to export the code to files that can be executed later.

That post shows how to integrate the results into a puppet configuration so it’s worth reading as well. It’s an excellent alternate take on Abrams workflow.

Although these workflows aren’t really reproducible research, they share many of the same traits and can be used for the same purposes. Both authors mention that they can send the Org file (either natively or in an exported format) to colleagues to allow them to reproduce an environment or even to act as a go by for setting up other environments. If you’re doing DevOps type work, you should definitely take a look at these two posts.

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

An Apropos Hydra

Posted on 2015-03-17 by jcs

Abo-abo is still blogging up a storm. I haven’t commented on every post because if I did I wouldn’t have time for writing about anything else. His latest post is about a hydra for apropos. My first reaction was, “Meh, just do 【Ctrl+h a】 and be done with it.” But abo-abo’s post reminded me that there’s more to apropos than the single command apropos. There’s also apropos-documentaiton, apropos-variable, apropos-command, apropos-library, apropos-user-option, and apropos-value.

Most of these either have no binding or are bound to a menu so I never think about them. I realized that by having an easy-to-invoke hydra I could make better use of the apropos system. A clear win. Take a look at abo-abo’s post and see if you don’t agree.

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Difference Between Malware and Adware

Posted on 2015-03-16 by jcs

Infosec Taylor Swift has a clarification for Lenovo, other computer manufacturers, and the journalists who report on them:

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Editing Files as Root

Posted on 2015-03-16 by jcs

How many times have you brought up a file to edit and discovered that you don’t have write permissions? Usually they’re system files but sometimes you’re tying to help a colleague and don’t have the proper permissions. You can always kill the buffer and start over but that’s sort of a pain.

Bozhidar Batsov over at Emacs Redux has a nice solution; actually 3 nice solutions. He provides the sudo-edit function that reopens the file as root. All you have to do is call it and the problem is solved. Batsov suggests binding it to 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+r】 which has a nice symmetry with 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+f】 so it’s easy to remember but, of course, you can use whatever makes sense in your environment.

After using that setup for a few years, Batsov decided that even calling sudo-edit was inconvenient so he advised ido-find-file (or find-file if you’re not using ido) to check the permissions and automatically reopen the file as root if required. That’s nice because you just open the file as usual and Emacs automatically does the right thing.

He also has a solution for emacsclient that I’ll let you explore on your own. Like the others, it’s a nice solution.

Batsov’s post was from a couple of years ago but I somehow missed it. It is most definitely worth your time if you ever have to edit files you don’t have write permissions to.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

And Make the Coffee

Posted on 2015-03-15 by jcs

So much more than a Swiss Army Knife:

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The CIA and Apple

Posted on 2015-03-15 by jcs

Just when you thought it couldn’t get much worse, The//Intercept is reporting that the CIA has been conducting a sustained multi-year effort to exploit Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The idea was to defeat Apple’s efforts to provide their users with unbreakable encryption. They also sought to break into the devices’ firmware so that they could insert malware.

In theory Americans needn’t worry because the CIA is prohibited from operating in the U.S. I’m confident that no American Irreal readers are sanguine about their safety. The CIA, I’m also sure, feels entirely justified in targeting foreigners even if they happen to be, say, the head of state of an ally.

This really is outlaw behavior; behavior that the U.S. government would raise to a major diplomatic issue if they discovered a foreign government were doing it to them. As for the targeting of Americans, it’s hard to see how it’s not illegal unless they have a warrant. That holds even if they pass off American operations to the FBI or NSA.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment