Monday, March 1, 2010

Comparing Emacs Version-parsing Libraries

Recently, I've become interested in advancing the (currently sad) state of Emacs package management. It is a well-documented problem (see here for more detail), so I won't discuss it generally.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Letter to the US Trade Representative

From this Ars Technica article, the US Trade Representative, the body in charge of negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), has a section open for comments about the treaty. Let them know that you favor an open Internet and balanced copyright laws. I've copied my comment to them (which was too long to fit in the form, blah) here.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Just to make your lives difficult...

I finally bit the bullet and renamed my GitHubaccount from "dhax" to "haxney". I did
this to increase the consistency of my online names, so hopefully things will be less confusing overall.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

News Flows

Just like old times, I'm turning an email reply into a full-fledged blog post.

This is in response to an email sent to me, which I have quoted inline.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/25/100125fa_fact_auletta

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Wearing SOCKS with Emacs

So apparently I have way too much time on my hands, so I went ahead and taught myself the amazingly cool bindat package of Emacs. It is basically a way of writing specifications for translating binary to alists (attribute lists) and back again. Once you have a specification written (and it is pretty easy once you get the hang of it), converting data back and forth is incredibly easy. I did run into a slight hitch with a couple things, though: