Emacs Redux on Avy

Posted on 2015-07-21 by jcs

I’ve been a fan of ace-jump-mode ever since I saw Magnar Sveen’s outstanding video on jumping around. Development on the package has gone dormant but abo-abo came to the rescue with avy. I’ve written about avy previously and agree with others writing on it that avy is a significant improvement on the original ace-jump-mode.

Bozhidar Batsov has a a few words to say about it too. Like the rest of us, he is celebrating the replacement of ace-jump-mode with avy and his post mentions something I didn’t know. If you have to work with camel case identifiers, the avy-goto-word-or-subword-1 function will do the right thing. I’d sooner take a pencil in the eye than use camel case but not everyone feels that way or has an option. If you’re one of those people, take a look at avy-goto-word-or-subword-1. It may be just what you need.

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Emacs Zen

Posted on 2015-07-20 by jcs

Bryan Roberts over at Soul Physics has an interesting Githup repository, called Emacs Zen, that shows how to set up Emacs on OS X as a LaTeX/Markdown/HTML/CSS/JavaScript system. If you want an Emacs installation geared for writing, his repository has all you need. He also has directions for getting and installing Emacs and the necessary packages such as ACUTeX. He mentions the PDF viewer skim, which, he claims, makes syncing with Emacs particularly easy.

The only important thing he doesn’t mention is Org mode. If you collaborate with colleagues who aren’t Emacs users, markdown may make some sense but, really, if you want to do your writing with a lightweight markup language, Org can’t be beat. Many researchers will automatically fire up LaTeX for their journal papers but as John Kitchin has shown, you can write in Org, import the journal style sheet, and export to journal-quality LaTeX.

Of course, you can use Roberts’ setup and still use Org mode so if you’re looking for an incredible writing system, his repository is worth taking a look at.

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Tiny

Posted on 2015-07-19 by jcs

Eric James Michael Ritz has an excellent post on another of abo-abo’s great packages.

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Ubiquitous Encryption

Posted on 2015-07-19 by jcs

Bruce Schneier has an update on the NSA’s XKEYSCORE program. As usual with Schneier’s writing, it’s an interesting and informative read. What I liked most, though, was this observation at the end

Ubiquitous encryption is the bane of listeners worldwide, and it’s the best thing we can deploy to make the world safer.

That’s why it’s important to get Aunt Millie and everyone else using encryption even when it’s not needed: if everyone is encrypting everything, it’s really hard to implement mass surveillance. This, I think, is the real reason the FBI and others are wetting their pants over the secure texting being offered by Apple and Android. They can and will use traditional investigatory methods to go after the real criminals just as they always have and are doing right now even when the criminals use secure texting. What they won’t be able to do is go sifting through everyone’s text messages looking for suspicious texts.

This is exactly why Moxie Marlinspike and his efforts are so disconcerting to the FBI and others who want to be able to read whatever we text or email. If the NSA or FBI knows that you’re involved in criminal behavior or have terrorist sympathies, they can doubtlessly arrange to wiretap your communications no matter what you do. The point is that if everyone is encrypting their communications then

  1. They can no longer sift through everyone’s communications looking for suspicious behavior.
  2. They can no longer use the fact that you are encrypting your communications as evidence that you might be a worthwhile target for additional surveillance.
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Moxie Marlinspike

Posted on 2015-07-18 by jcs

I’ve written many times about the need to make email encryption accessible to Aunt Millie (see here, here, and here for example). Sadly, it’s a really hard problem. Now, maybe there’s some hope. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about Moxie Marlinspike, who, the WSJ says, is terrifying the FBI with software that holds the promise of universal encryption.

Marlinspike is producing encryption software that obviates the need for user key management, the really hard part of building a robust encryption framework. From what I can see, it works pretty much like iMessage to handle the keys and perhaps the messages go to a server to help mitigate leaking too much metadata. The server part doesn’t matter because the encryption is end-to-end and the server never sees message content. Since the servers don’t keep logs, third parties can’t get at the metadata either, at least not directly.

Right now, there are secure phone and text messaging components but an email solution is underway. When that happens, governments are going to have to come clean, admit what they’re doing, and pass laws trying to outlaw the services. It’s not clear that they’ll be able to do that.

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Associating ielm with a Buffer

Posted on 2015-07-17 by jcs

Another handy tip from Wilfred Hughes:

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The EFF’s Most Important Cases

Posted on 2015-07-17 by jcs

This is the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 25 anniversary. ars technica celebrated that anniversary with a nice article on the EFF’s most influential cases from its first 25 years. The takeaway from the article is that the EFF has been fighting to make the Internet a better and safer place for us by resisting corporate attempts to control what content can be published and government attempts to monitor what we do on the Internet even if we’re not doing anything illegal.

I’m a member and urge all of you to become members too. Even if you can’t afford more than $10, send it off to them. They’re fighting the good fight and they’re fighting it for us. They deserve our gratitude and support.

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There is No Internet of Things

Posted on 2015-07-16 by jcs

A useful corollary to There is No Cloud.

In many ways, this is worse. Who knows what all those computers are doing or who they’re phoning home to?

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The Emacs C-x 4 Bindings

Posted on 2015-07-16 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a very nice review of the【Ctrl+x 4】key bindings. Most of us learned—or at least read about—those when we started with Emacs but probably forgot about them because they were too esoteric for us then. That’s where his post is useful: it’s an excellent reminder of those key bindings and the functionality they provide.

For example, did you know, or remember, that 【Ctrl+x 4 c】 provides a clone of the current buffer in another window? Or even that 【Ctrl+x 4 f】 opens a new file in the other window? There are others as well so unless you’re up to speed with the 【Ctrl+x 4】 key bindings, head on over to mbork’s post and take a look.

UPDATE: Borkowski’s server appears to be having problems. Neither the above link nor those of previous posts about him are working.

UPDATE 2: MaikuMori comments that you can see the post here.

UPDATE 3: Looks like Borkowski’s site is back up.

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Magit 2.1.0 Summary

Posted on 2015-07-15 by jcs

Over at LWN.net, Nathan Willis has a nice summary of the Magit 2.1.0 features. Obviously he doesn’t cover all the features or even all the new features but it’s worth reading for getting an idea what’s in the latest release.

If you haven’t yet tried Magit, give Willis’ post a read and load Magit from Melpa. In the unlikely event that you don’t like it all you have to do is unload it. You won’t have to do any configuration to try it out so you can load it for a trial very easily and cheaply.

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