<p>As an IT consultant, I travel a lot. I mean, <em>a lot</em>. Part of the pleasure is having to deal with day-to-day online life on open, potentially free-for-all hotel and conference WiFi. In other words, the type of networks you really want to do your online banking, ecommerce and other potentially sensitive operations on. After seeing one too many ads for VPN services on bad late night TV I finally decided I needed to do something about it. Ideally I intended to this on the cheap and learn…
<p>Straight from the “make work for yourself because there aren’t enough hours in the day already” files.</p>
<p>My apologies for the sudden instability of my blog. I’ve managed to make a hash of an update on the main Wordpress site when trying to update to a newer PHP version and had to switch to the Jekyll “backup” site that isn’t quite production ready yet.</p>
<p>Ben Simon has a post up on his blog describing how <a href="http://www.blogbyben.com/2018/04/a-little-scheme-setup-and-development.html">he set up a scheme development environment on his Galaxy S9 Android phone</a>. It was also an especially timely post as I had been eyeing a Mac Quadra with a Symbolics Lisp Machine extension card on eBay. As if we needed another reminder just how powerful current phones have become!</p>
<p>I did have to learn some Prolog when I was studying CS and back then it was one of those “why do we have to learn this when everybody is programming in C or Turbo Pascal” (yes, I’m old). For some strange reason things clicked for me quicker with Prolog than Lisp, which I now find quite ironic given that I’ve been using Emacs for since the early 1990s.</p>
<p>I’ve been meaning to post this link for quite a while now but keep forgetting to do so. If you are planning to store geospatial data in MongoDB, the database offers you a variety of ways to deal with geospatial-specific data storage and queries.</p>
<p>Saw the <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-05/msg00765.html">announcement</a> on on the GNU Emacs mailing list this morning. Much to my surprise, it’s also already available on <a href="https://brew.sh/">homebrew</a>. So my Mac is now sporting a new fetching version of Emacs as well :). I’ve been running the release candidate on several Linux machines already and was very happy with it, so upgrading my OS X install was pretty much a no brainer.</p>
<p>I’ve <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2016/12/13/converting-files-from-dos-to-unix-file-formats-using-emacs/">previously blogged</a> about using Emacs to convert line endings and use it as an alternative to the dos2unix/unix2dos tools. Using <em>set-buffer-file-coding-system</em> works well and has been my go-to conversion method.</p>
<p>As posted in a few places, <a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-04/msg00258.html">Emacs 26.1-RC1 has been released</a>. Following up my <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2017/11/15/emacs-on-the-linux-subsystem-for-windows/">previous experiments with running Emacs on the Windows Subsystem for Linux</a>, I naturally had to see how the latest version would work out. For that, I built the RC1 on an up-to-date Ubuntu WSL. I actually built it twice – once…
<p>Quite a while ago, I answered a question about <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17252441/can-someone-please-show-me-a-simple-deadlock-with-two-threads-example-in-c/17252501?noredirect=1#comment84906518_17252501">the basic deadlock scenario</a> on Stack Overflow. More recently, I got an interesting comment on it. The poster asked if it was possible to get a deadlock with a single lock and an I/O operation. My first gut reaction was “no, not really”, but it got me…
