emacs

NSA Claims That Linux Journal Is A Forum for Radical Extremists? THIS MAY BE FAKE (Updated)

gregladen — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 17:36:54 +0000

NSA Claims That Linux Journal Is A Forum for Radical Extremists? THIS MAY BE FAKE (Updated)

When I first became a regular user of Linux, several years ago, I tried out different text editors and quickly discovered that emacs was my best choice. By coincidence, about that time I ran into an old emacs manual written by Richard Stallman in the dollar section of a used booksore. In that edition, near the end of the book, was a section on “Mail Amusements.” This documented the command “M-x spook” which adds “a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.” (I note that the term “spook” in those days meant “spy.”) Stallman notes in the current edition of the manual,

The idea behind this feature is the suspicion that the NSA and other intelligence agencies snoop on all electronic mail messages that contain keywords suggesting they might find them interesting. (The agencies say that they don’t, but that’s what they would say.) The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all. Whether or not this is true, it at least amuses some people.

It is amazing to see how things change over time. But this, unfortunately, is not a good example of change over time. As I’m sure every Linux user knows by now, the National Security Agency has included “Linux Journal” (the journal and the site, apparently) as an indicator for potential extremist activity. If you subscribe to the journal, visit the site, mention it in an email, or anything like that, your internet traffic will be subject to additional special attention.

Apparently the NSA captures all, or very nearly all, of the Internet traffic for just long enough to sort through it for key indicators, which they use to pull out a subset of traffic for longer term storage and possible investigation. If you visit Linux Journal’s web site, your internet traffic, apparently, is subject to this treatment.

Why?

Well, this should be obvious. Linux users are extreme. Linux is extreme. If I was the NSA I’d be keeping a close eye on the Linux community because that is where a major national intelligence agency is most likely to find useful, and extremely good, security related ideas. GNU/Linux, FOSS, OpenSource – these are all keywords I’d be watching because this is where the cutting edge is. LAMP systems are the most secure servers used on the Internet, by and large. Linux-like operating systems are the preferred systems for devices that need both reliability and security. I’m sure the NSA itself uses Linux as its primary operating system because it is the most adaptable and secure one they can get. If not, they probably use a cousin or hybrid of some sort.

Also, penguins. Penguins are known to be extreme. They wear tuxedos, who does that anymore? They live on the Antarctic Continent. I can’t think of anything more extreme than this. The adoption of Tux the Penguin as the symbolic mascot of GNU/Linux is a huge red flag for the entire intelligence community.

I do find it amusing that people are a bit up in arms over this. Did anyone ever seriously consider the idea that the Linux community and their Penguin friends would not be the subject of special NSA attention? It would be rather disappointing were it not. Stallman added M-x spook to emacs decades ago. We’ve known for years that the NSA snoops on everything and everyone. Linux is a widely used extremely important operating system. Linux Journal is a key publication used by a wide range of Linux ~~extremists~~, er, users and developers. Of course the NSA is watching.

Kyle Rankin at Linux Journal who is a known Linux user notes that there is a more specific reason the NSA would view the Linux community as a hotbed of potential extremism. This is where things like Tor and Tails exist as projects and are mostly used. These are, of course, technologies to be more anonymous on the internet. Tor comes form a project originally funded by the US Naval Research Laboratory and DARPA with early work on it supported by the radical Electronic Frontier Foundation. It has also been funded by the US State Department and the National Science Foundation. The original idea was to allow communications over the internet to be untraceable so sailors (or others) could write home and keep their lips tight (loose lips sink ships and all that). With subversive beginnings and evil intent such as this, naturally the NSA would want to keep an eye on it.

I’m sorry to tell that if you’ve been reading this blog post you are probably on the NSA list of extremists. I use the terms “Linux Journal,” “Linux,” and “Penguin” several times in this blog post. And you are looking at this blog post in your browser. You are so screwed.

I would like to challenge the OpenSource/FOSS/GNU/Linux community to take up Stallman’s initiative and bring it to the next level. Let us M-x spook the spooks. Apps, browser add-ins, cron scripts, and other small scale technologies could be used to add subversive terms such as Linux Journal and Penguin to all of our Internet traffic, all the time. The NSA would quickly run out of disk space and someone would tell them to get back to work and do something useful. Real extremists just made a radical extremist Caliphate in the Middle East forchristakes. I would think the NSA would be more focused on such things than on Linux Journal, or Linux. I can see keeping an eye on the Penguins, though.

UPDATE: Charles Johnson send me THIS and THIS. This whole thing could be fake. Go have a look and tell me what you think.

gregladen Mon, 07/07/2014 - 13:36

Tags

emacs

Linux

Technology

computer

Extremists

NSA

Overthrow of the US Government

penguins

Technology

Do we have a secret Penguin handshake?

Yes we do.

Next time I have to send some extremist Linux message to another agen..er, Linux user, I'll be sure to use the new modem attachment for my shoe phone. It's cleverly disguised as a shoelace...

With the advent of modern crypto-browsers like the Tor Project, Linux does not have that same edgy quality ascribed to its users that it once had.

dccff28314d9ae4ed262cfc6f35e5153
c4d4d037d7d0a05e8f526d18aa25fb5e
01545fa976c8367b4f0d59169ac4866c
08d25bf879e353686a974b7b14ae7d81
b31731ea6cdbebe1d02f8193db420886
0bc7243aacd5f80f8110dcf3165dffd0
5174d847970b88e0749995b6525b4b7a
633effb1dca398d25a08bc8d2f692892
d9287f5c622613495830863be647b12a
4d096ec8c076b03fd4d9872ef2670bbc

A fun project would be a Raspberry Pi TOR server that I could use to send my almost a terabyte of digital photos (of Penguins) to myself. Suitably encrypted, natch.

What could be more extremist than using free software? God damn commies! ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux
NSA wrote it, RedHat (and others) use it.
Your tax dollars at work. Therefore, the NSA is a bunch of extremists too!

I knew it... I just knew it. Now I'm going to have to wrap my monitor in aluminum foil.

Heh, Roland beat me to it: SE Linux. The source code was downloadable from the NSA website as of a few years ago; I have a copy around somewhere.

I have to say though, the level of narcissism around the whole NSA story is getting annoying. All these people thinking they're so important that they've got NSA files. Clue: No, you're not important enough to be worth more than a microsecond of attention from any of the three-letter agencies: less attention than you get from a traffic cop watching the cars go through an intersection.

If you're really concerned about privacy and the liberties it protects, take a close look at Google and Facebook. They make NSA look like small business by comparison, content-scraping and dossier-keeping included. They are unregulated and unaccountable, and you don't get to vote for their boss every four years.

@G: True, but whereas I can (and do) "opt out" of things like Facebook and avoid their significant yet lightly-regulated data acquisition, I am not granted the same opt-out privileges with the NSA.

And whereas Facebook, et al, are held to the laws of the land (good or bad or incomplete as they may be), the NSA has been operating outside of the law (or conducting "legal theatre" with the FISC and their worn-out rubber stamps).

G
Yeah but it's abuse just waiting to happen

because checks and balances
because politics and ideology
because mission creep
because power corrupts

If you think it can't happen here, then don't bother with vigilance. Eventually you'll get to see if anything happens to what's left of your democracy.

Damn you, Laden! I was clean until now, and then I read your post. Now I have to start all over again.

Eagle! Mule! Elephant! Bull! Bear! rinse and repeat.

rjb

@G
Funny how some people never kick upwards but always downwards. In this case someone telling others what to do.

@G: One other point: Google and Facebook might use some of these techniques, but their aim is to fatten their wallets with the results.

For all we know, the NSA will use the information they gain to "erase" political undesirables -- something that Google, Facebook, et al won't do, lest they "kill the golden goose".

Excuse me, there's a group thumping a battering ram at my door... I need to go now8g47ysg;o0auf14jjsttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

Brainstorms @ 12: There is no "opting out", unless you run a bunch of privacy apps, that will also show you exactly how much cyber-stalking is going on by those entities. Ixquick search "persistent cookies," "Local stored objects," and the like, and/or go to EFF.org and look for their documents on the subject.

If you correspond with anyone who uses GMail or call anyone who uses Google Voice, you're also being intercepted and scraped, and it's not always obvious when someone is using one of those.

BJD @ 15: "kick down," baloney, unless you think I'm richer than Mark Zuckerberg.

Brainstorms @16: The fact that their aim is to fatten up their wallets also gives them incentives that NSA does not have. As for "erasing political undesirables," that's paranoid conspiracy nonsense promoted by people who think themselves important enough to be considered threats. As for Google & Facebook not doing bad-things with their data, Ixquick-search either of them plus the word "privacy" and read up.

I could post well over fifty links here with specific stories from credible mainstream media and credible tech blogs, going into excruciating detail, but posting links gets these comments stuck in the spam queue so you'll have to do the search.

It is so simple to avoid this kind of problem. If web magazines would REALLY appreciate end-users privacy they would start using SSL on all of the web pages (www, forum, etc)! You know beside the content of web page SSL also encrypts URL address too (except full domain name). SSL should be implement properly, look at ssllabs.com/ssltest/ to get A+ grade.

Can we totally avoid NSA spying? No. But we can make it harder for them (like encrypting web pages with SSL) and make them to spend more money. On massive scale this would have huge effect. But you know it is easier to cry like a baby... solution is simple dumb asses.

Anyone who thinks that thwarting the NSA with technological tricks is a simple matter is very naive. For some background, James Bamford has written extensively on the organization. And follow the news. They have their fingers in everything that signals, have more money than God, and aggressively hoover up talent like an army of manic hoarders.

A couple of decades ago they were measuring the computing power of their farms in acres. Now it's hard to even imagine what. So yeah, in its various forms and incarnations, it looks like the idea, the genie of Total Information Awareness is now permanently out of the bottle.

@Obstreperous Applesauce, I am perfectly aware we as average Joe can't really measure with agencies, but this particular problem could be easily solved with SSL (the problem was to scan the URL address on international network link). The reaction of article authors are in my humble opinion unprofessional. They intentionally try to fire the _emotions_ on people instead of actually provide some kind of professional answer. They are using 'shouting in the desert' principle instead of acting proactive and start implementing some security/privacy features. It will not solve whole of the problem (at all), but the message should be 'we care' about end-user privacy, so we are doing our best in this direction to put one little tiny stone in the mosaic of privacy and so educate people to make the same step into more private world, you know to have first step of security/privacy is to close windows and lock the door - I am not talking about sophisticated security measures, just the one that is obvious and very easy to implement.

P.S. There is just one (local in my country) magazine that has done this kind of measures and implemented SSL on all services they provide. Did they win no, they show that they care.

From those links it does appear as if this is at least partially faked.

rjb

Security,
Ok, I think I see where you're coming from now.

The article is humorous. Personally, I like humorous. It's not always easy to get people to care about something, and there are a lot of ways to do it. Different strokes... They're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Good, its about time they started rounding up some of the sweaty linux loons, bleating about 'freedom'
I use windows with wow nothing but freeware and open source software, and guess what? It does what I want and guess what else ? I design embedded systems, and quess what else as well and also, I dont need to prove that I know about computers by typing commands into a terminal.

Well, good for you, me, good for you. You sure showed us.

Did you update your virus checker this AM? Of course you did, or you wouldn't have been able to write that email!

@me

Ooh, how manly. Where do you design these "embedded systems?" In your mother's basement?

BTW, be careful of that freeware. It's not as free as you think.

rjb

I Thought We Solved This NSA Thing Long Ago

gregladen — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 15:17:08 +0000

I Thought We Solved This NSA Thing Long Ago

Or, at least, I'm surprised that this earlier implemented solution has not been mentioned in all the discussion about NSA spying.

Richard Stallman invented an approach to obviating the NSA's attempts to spy on email. He included it in emacs, the world's greatest text editor. Here how it works, from the manual. The "M" is the "alt" key (for all practical purposes) and "M-x followed by a word implements the command attached to that word.

32.6 Mail Amusements

M-x spook adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.

The idea behind this feature is the suspicion that the NSA¹ and other intelligence agencies snoop on all electronic mail messages that contain keywords suggesting they might find them interesting. (The agencies say that they don't, but that's what they would say.) The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all. Whether or not this is true, it at least amuses some people.

You can use the fortune program to put a “fortune cookie” message into outgoing mail. To do this, add fortune-to-signature to mail-setup-hook:

(add-hook 'mail-setup-hook 'fortune-to-signature)

You will probably need to set the variable fortune-file before using this.

________________________
Footnotes
[1] The US National Security Agency.

That is from the current, on-line emacs manual but it also appears in my hard copy of the manual which I believe dates to the last quarter of the 20th century.

gregladen Wed, 08/14/2013 - 11:17

Tags

I don't want to make the suggestion that you are a bunch of idiots is just that your idiotic suggestions are!
I will only imagine that the NSA are there for a particular reason, the next time another sep 11 happens you will thank your smart ways to their success.

So let me get this straight. You put these terms into your email to deliberately get NSA to read your email (that they would not have done without the terms automatically inserted). And this will overload NSA so terrorists can avoid detection and bring down a plane over the Atlantic. Very clever. Fortunately, NSA will figure this out and develop an algorithm to defeat it.

"I’m surprised that this earlier implemented solution has not been mentioned" -- that's because this is no solution. At best, it's showing them the finger. I presume they don't care.

Furthermore, the whole scheme rests upon the assumption that The Observers have limited resources. This might have been true ten years ago, but these days, they have -for all practical purposes- unlimited means.

This only works if enough people do it to drive the signal to noise ratio close to 1. If only a few people do it, then NSA simply spends more CPU cycles looking at their e-mail--which is no big deal for them.

@Eric
Actually, I don't think this noise will be mistaken for a signal. I'm not sure wether it even qualifies as noise.
A single block of keywords, like "bomb gun sword ambush", is easily filtered. If the keywords were distributed over bomb the entire body of the gun message it might be more effective, but would ambush be disruptive even for the intended audience. Sword.

Do you know where your .emacs file is? UPDATED

gregladen — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:07:10 +0000

Do you know where your .emacs file is? UPDATED

I just reconfigured my laptop with a new system (a form of Linux) and, almost as important, a new power brick. That second item may be more interesting than it sounds for some of you; I'll write that up later. This change also meant trashing my emacs configuration file. I didn't have to trash it, of course, but it made sense to do so. I don't use my laptop in any way that requires that I pay attention to data saved on it. It is a data-free appliance. Sort of. Or, at least, if I took the hard drive out of it and put it in a blender, I would not lose anything important other than a blender which would surely break. In order to achieve this state, I manage certain data not by backing it up but by ignoring it. If I toss the hard drive and put in a new one and install a new system, my emacs configuration file(s) can be gotten off of another computer. Or, preferably, just recreated from scratch.

Why would I want to recreate my emacs configuration files from scratch? Because a) it is fun and b) with the newest version of emacs, a number of things that required excessive messing around with before have become normal. Thus, the configuration files are less cumbersome and easier to manage.

In case you are still reading this post about emacs (good for you!) but don't know much about it let me explain a few things. If you are already an emacs expert, you may want to skip down to my .emacs file and get right into ridiculing it.

emacs is the best text editor in the world for a number of reasons, but mainly because pretty nearly everything is configurable, and it is very cleanly associated with a very powerful programming language that you can write programs in to make your emacs text editor do amazing things like manage your email, carry out sophisticated statistical analyses on data, make coffee, or stand in for an operating system. Or, you can do like I do; find where other people have written these things and graciously made them available for others to use.

But emacs also suffers from a logical conundrum I call The emacs Paradox. Here is how it goes:

emacs is wonderful because you can configure it any way you want.

emacs keybindings (what happens when you press certain keys) are the most efficient possible therefore you must not change emacs keybindings.

We know this is an interesting paradox because right after hearing all about how emacs keybindings are wonderful, the first thing you will be told to do if you read the introductory material on emacs is to swap the caps lock and control keys, and the second thing you will be told to do is to replace the alt key with any one of a number of alternatives "so you won't have to squish up your fingers" while executing "meta" commands. This duality ('emacs is perfect 'emacs is flawed) is part of what makes emacs a religion.

Like this:

That's the guy who invented emacs.

OK, back to the point. emacs out off the box is probably pefect for some people. emacs with two or three hundred lines of elisp code in various files, some compiled, is perfect for others. But I use emacs to write, not program, so my needs are met by the out of the box version with a hadnful of changes.

My emacs file is below, and it is annotated to make it clear what each step does. This is all hand-codedd. Many of these changes can be made by selecting configuration options from the emacs menu.

Included in the file are a few comments of possible additional changes I may or may not make. I'm agnostic as to whether these changes are worthwhile; I go back and forth. The comments are in there as reminders.

The file is called .emacs and resides in the home directory on a Linux computer with all the other "dot" files, which are by default hidden from view in many file managers (unless you specify otherwise).

And here is mine (UPDATED to make CUA work better within emacs and between apps:

_____________________________

; 
;
; This is a text editing-focused .emacs file
; a ";" means "comment" if it is in the first position
;

;---Reload the .emacs file after messing with with alt-x reload-dotemacs

(defun reload-dotemacs()
  "Reload .emacs file"
  (interactive)
  (load-file "~/.emacs"))


; do not display the annoying startup screen

(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)

; get rid of annoying box cursor
; replace it with a nice bar cursor

(set-default 'cursor-type 'bar)

; type face size needs to be bigger on this laptop
; number (190)/10 = point size 

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 190)

; scroll bar on right where all other scroll bars
; in the universe ever are

(set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)


; make Visual Line Mode work in text mode all the time
; (this means, make the text wrap as in a normal
;  text editor)

(setq text-mode t)
    (global-visual-line-mode 1)
    (cua-mode t)

; turn automatic spell checking on more or less universally
    
(defun turn-spell-checking-on ()
  "Turn flyspell-mode on."
  (flyspell-mode 1)
  )

(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-spell-checking-on)

; turn on "CUA mode" ... so control -c, -v, -x, -z and 
; a few other things work as they do in virtually all
; other software ever

    (setq cua-auto-tabify-rectangles nil) ;; Don't tabify after rectangle commands
    (transient-mark-mode 1) ;; No region when it is not highlighted
    (setq cua-keep-region-after-copy t) ;; Standard Windows behaviour

; Make the keys work even if CUA does not:

    (global-set-key (kbd "C-c") 'copy)
    (global-set-key (kbd "C-v") 'paste)

;  Make emacs use the system clipboard even if CUA does not:

    (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)


; associations
; add later some minor modes for certain kinds of files
;
; macros 
; add later some handy markdown and html macros and functions
;

; make ctrl f cause forward "search" 

(global-set-key (kbd "C-f") 'isearch-forward)

; make ctrl s save the current document

(global-set-key (kbd "C-s") 'save-buffer)

; some other time make the escape key stop commands in process
;

; Don't make the files with the #'s in the names
; a default emacs behavior we don't want

(setq auto-save-default nil) ; stop creating those #auto-save# files

; make a hidden backup to a directory mirroring the full path 
; of files edited 

(defun my-backup-file-name (fpath)
  "Return a new file path of a given file path.
If the new path's directories does not exist, create them."
  (let* (
        (backupRootDir "~/.emacs.d/emacs-backup/")
        (filePath (replace-regexp-in-string "[A-Za-z]:" "" fpath )) ; remove Windows driver letter in path, e.g. “C:”
        (backupFilePath (replace-regexp-in-string "//" "/" (concat backupRootDir filePath "~") ))
        )
    (make-directory (file-name-directory backupFilePath) (file-name-directory backupFilePath))
    backupFilePath
  )
)

(setq make-backup-file-name-function 'my-backup-file-name)

;
; later:
; 
; make home and end buttons work better
; 
; figure out how to make emacs work better with markdown
;
; Tabs, fast tab switching 
;

gregladen Wed, 12/12/2012 - 13:07

Tags

emacs

http://files.myopera.com/bashvi/albums/642917/vi-emacs-final.png

I'm only slightly evolved from using "ed", so I use "vi". At least I don't have the crippled fingers from using "emacs".

Back when I was in grad school, there was an emacs vs. vi holy war raging (perhaps it rages still), and my sysadmin was definitely on the vi side. So I ended up using vi, despite its infamously user-hostile interface.

It's better now--at least it color codes keywords and comments when you are writing source code in any of several different languages--but it's still frequently annoying. It likes to wrap lines when it wants to (there is a reason I want all of that text on one line, damn it!), and it can do spectacularly destructive things if you think you are in edit mode when you are not.

But yes, it's largely inertia that keeps me with vi. I'd have to (re)learn an entirely different set of arcane keystrokes to switch back to emacs, and I don't use either program enough to justify the effort (I have a LaTeX application on my Mac, and it has an editor built in; for other things like paper reviews, TextEdit is perfectly adequate).

Jim, you could always grow an extra finger in just the right place, using certain elisp code.

Eric, yes, it rages!

on the iMac, I recommend BBE.

I never considered the C-f = isearch-forward setting. Duh. I'm doing it.

I also like having a comment like this in my .emacs file, since I forget it after months, but always seem to want it when I'm looking at an elisp file.

;; C-x C-e == eval-last-sexp

I'm suspicious of any text editor that includes a text adventure.

But it makes coffee.

I'll take this as an opportune moment to remind you of this:
"The emacs philosophy is deeply flawed and needs to be overhauled. I’m working on a post that follows up on that rather tendentious statement, and don’t worry, I’ll make good on it."

It's only been a year, no rush, I can wait. On the plus side you've got another follower.

I see what you did there.

Still working on it!

('John 'McCarthy)

gregladen — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:10:16 +0000

('John 'McCarthy)

('born '1927)
('championed 'ai)
('created 'lisp)
('thought-up 'space-elevator)
('won 'turing-award)
('died 'oct-23-2011)

gregladen Tue, 10/25/2011 - 08:10

Tags

emacs

Technology

I'd like to add another important prediction by JMC, found in Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", section 12.2 (p. 350f in my paperback): He noted that only few poets can make a living selling poetry books. As a solution he recommended to put the texts onto an "international network" (yet to be invented back then) where people can read them for a penny to be transferred to the poet's account (using a method to be invented as well).

I must be getting old, virtually all the people I admire are either dead or dying.

Column Editing in Emacs (cua mode)

gregladen — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:23:37 +0000

Column Editing in Emacs (cua mode)

This is very nice:

hat tip: Got Emacs?

gregladen Mon, 10/24/2011 - 06:23

Tags

emacs

Land Of Lisp Book Giveaway

gregladen — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 11:37:25 +0000

Land Of Lisp Book Giveaway

You will recall that I recently reviewed the book Land of Lisp. It turns out I've got two copies of it, and would like to give one away. To you. As a bounty.

This is not a contest. It is a bounty. You can "win" a brand new copy of Land of Lisp very easily. What you need to do is to supply the best eLisp code, in my opinion, in the comments below. The code should have the following characteristics:

1) It should work, probably as an .el file. Code that you just think might work or has parts like "Then you do something like this bla bla bla" is interesting and you are welcome to post it, but it won't win you the book. But do post it ... someone else might get it to work and they can win!

2) It should be useful for me, in its working form. Assume I'm running the latest easily installable (via synaptic) version of emacs (23 or so). I am a writer and a blogger. I do all my writing in emacs. Keeping track of links, doing stuff writers might want to do with a file, stuff like that, could be good. I'm always trying to find links to old posts that I've written. I write my posts in HTML using HTML mode. I do a lot of stuff in org mode. Stuff that helps in writing code is probably NOT good for me, as I almost never do that.

Hint: I read these blogs:

Emacs-Fu
Got Emacs?
Mastering Emacs
minor emacs wizardry

And a few others.

Your code doesn't actually have to be yours, but give credit as to where you got it, and the original writer of the code gets the book! But if that is the code that "wins" the "bounty" then you'll get something too, I promise.

gregladen Sun, 10/23/2011 - 07:37

Tags

Seems a bit silly to me. Offering a book on _learning_ LISP to the person that posts the best LISP code. A bit like offering mechanic lessons to the person that fixes your car the best?

I'd like the book, I haven't got the faintest idea how the code in LISP, so I think I qualify as someone who needs it.

Yes, I, too, would love to have this book so I can finally learn some Lisp, but I don't know any Lisp yet, so you'll have to wait a bit for my submission. When does this bounty-hunt end?

Also, I use VIM, not Emacs. That would be another hurdle to take.

Well, you have a point, all of you, but Land of Lisp, while not advanced, would be of interest to those who are messing around with emacs. I learned a LOT from the book yet I've written a few code snippets myself already. I could easily submit my "HTML tag wrapper" code for instance.

When does it end? Let's say January 1st, unless there is nothing brilliant by then, in which case, the following January 1st.

(write-line "Hello I don't know LISP!!! I need a book to teach me")

ejes, your code yields:
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-function write-line)
(write-line "Hello I don't know LISP!!! I need a book to teach me")
eval((write-line "Hello I don't know LISP!!! I need a book to teach me"))
eval-last-sexp-1(nil)
eval-last-sexp(nil)
call-interactively(eval-last-sexp nil nil)
recursive-edit()
byte-code("\306 @\307=\203!

Lisp related news, it's a sad day.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-20125026-92/john-mccarthy-creator-of-l…

Does this help you, to qualify me in the race to get a lisp book?

http://emacsworld.blogspot.com/2011/10/searching-internet-from-any-buff…

Sivaram

Emacsworld

A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books

gregladen — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:40:19 +0000

A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books

Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! is a book about lisp programming. If you are into programming for fun, artificial intelligence, role playing games, or an emacs user, you should take a look at this book. I've got some info on this book as well as a few others for the budding emacs enthusiasts.

Land of Lisp teaches the lisp programming language using the development of games as a focal point.

Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages, and occurs in numerous dialects. The standard form that is taught in Land of Lisp is Common Lisp.

The teaching style in Land of Lisp assumes a fair amount of knowledge of what programming languages are, which is reasonable because if you were not already into programming it is unlikely that you would start with Lisp. The book does an excellent job of highlighting the philosophical and technical aspects of the language so by the time you are done with it you feel like you've learned a lot more than just how to write some code in what by many accounts is a rarely used esoteric language.

Except that it isn't, of course. There is quite a bit more lisp code in use than you might expect, and in places that you might be surprised to learn (read the book to find out). And, of course, lisp is the language in which the One True Editor is written, and the language that is used in that editor (emacs) by users to customize and modify its behavior.

Which brings us to the other two books that I wanted to mention.

If you want to learn lisp because you want to mess with your .emacs file, Land of Lisp is probably the third book you should read. It is not really about that kind of lisp, but what you learn in Land of Lisp would still be helpful.

Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition is probably the closest thing to an emacs manual that is both current and very accessible. By the time you are done reading this book you'll know more about emacs than you'll probably want to know, even though really complex emacs lisp programming is not covered. Another way to put this: With this book under your belt, you'll feel much less lost in places like the emacs wiki and all those great but very technical emacs blogs (like this one) that are out there which assume a certain amount of knowledge.

If you want to get into messing with your emacs at a higher level you can try Writing GNU Emacs Extensions. This book is actually available as an iPhone app, believe it or not. (Not in HD for the iPad, however). Bob Glickstein's book goes into much more detail about wrangling your emacs to do amazing thing that only you thought of and only you would want to do, but it does so by walking you through a number of fairly obvious fixes staring with simple things like changing key bindings and working through making minor and major modes, error recovery, and messing around with lists.

As long as we're on the subject I should mention the GNU Emacs Manual by the inventor of emacs, Richard Stallman. GNU Emacs Manual, For Version 21, 15th Edition. As you can see from the title, the most current book is for version 21, but emacs is on version 23 and moving past that. That hardly matters because the point of the manual is not to tell you the latest, but to get you past the initially steep learning curve this highly versatile editor gives you.

The problem with many emacs sources including Stallman's book is that they rely on, push, and assume you will like (after a few weeks of torture) the emacs philosophy. But you won't. The emacs philosophy is deeply flawed and needs to be overhauled. I'm working on a post that follows up on that rather tendentious statement, and don't worry, I'll make good on it. I found Debra Cameron's Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition to be far less insistent on drinking that particular Kool Aid and therefore much more useful. By the way, my copy of Stallman's book is a first edition. I think it might be in blue mimeograph.

And finally, I want to mention Robert Chassell's "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp." I think this is considered to be a very good book for this purpose, though I've not used it much. One very interesting thing about it is this: You can go to a bookstore, say Amazon.com, and find a copy of An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp for about 75 bucks. Or, you can click here and find several options for downloading it for free. Which is obviously some kind of joke. And the emacs community does have a sense of humor ... it would have to! One of the neat emacs features pointed out in the first edition of Stallman's book is a special minor mode that goes along with the system then used for checking email from emacs. This put a sentence or two of anti-American pro-Communist or otherwise subversive text at the end of every email in order to obviate the process of sifting through everyone's email for subversive text. Stallmann's idea was that if every single email contained randomly generated subversive text the NAS could go home.

As it turns out, however, even though emacs can be made to serve as a virtual operating system and do everything from email to math to desktop publishing to making coffee, even die-hard emacs users have mostly switched to other (equally esoteric) methods of handling email, to the extent that Debra's book only glosses over the possibility and recommends you not bother.

A true emacs user will have all of these resources at hand, in print, in ebook form, or as an a ASCII text file, as needed.

OK, time to C-x C-c.

gregladen Mon, 09/26/2011 - 07:40

Tags

Can you say "List of LISP" five times fast?

It would be worse if this was about the many varieties of lisp, enumerated in different ways. Then it would be "Lists of Lisps"

ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. The best introduction to Common Lisp as a general-purpose programming language. A bit hard going for inexperienced programmers, however very helpful indeed!

"I'm working on a post that follows up on that rather tendentious statement..."
No rush, but I'm very interested in your thoughts on the emacs philosophy.

Emulating The Terminal Emulators For Fun (with emacs color-theme)

gregladen — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:40:00 +0000

Emulating The Terminal Emulators For Fun (with emacs color-theme)

I have a small laptop that I carry to the coffee shop for writing. It is a bit shaky in the hardware department, very small, and has no functioning wireless. The hard drive is encrypted. These attributes together make it the perfect laptop to carry around between, say, the gym, the coffee shop, the grocery store, Huxley's daycare, etc. I have a small number of files synced on it via a hard wired network connection at home so there is quasi-real time work to do with it, but only a subset of the larger number of files and folders I regularly use. The lack of an Internet connection means that I am not distracted while writing, the low value of the hardware means it won't matter if it gets dropped, crushed or even stolen, and having the hard drive encrypted with a killer password and such means that the very valuable data (as if) that is on it can't fall into the wrong hands.

But a computer with such serious limitations is not much fun unless you add a few quirks. So, I've configured the interface to emulate a terminal. I'm using gnome, with a white type on black background theme off the shelf, so the gui file manager looks like a cli terminal file manager like Midnight Commander. I use terminal based apps for a number of things anyway, so when a terminal is maximized the laptop looks like, well, a terminal. And when I'm using emacs, which is how I do all my writing, I have a color theme that is mostly black in the background and white in front (text), but with a number of old fashioned terminal looking colors here and there on the window, maximized with minimal fixings (i.e., no toolbar, menu bar turned off, etc.).

One might ask, why not just use terminal with no x-windowing system or desktop, then I'd have a true terminal-like interface? There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the X system properly configured to use the native resolution of the screen and the abilities of the graphics card in graphics mode produces a much better and easier to read output than the text terminal version of the screen. This was not true in the (distant) past, when graphical interfaces dropped on top of DOS were ugly and hard to use, low resolution and poorly implemented. But those days are long gone, possibly even predating the widespread use of desktop Linux.

Another reason is that I do actually want to use the mouse. What for? When? For whatever I want, whenever I want. It's there, why not use it? Yes, you can use a mouse in a text terminal with a small utility, but it's quirky and bad and doesn't do everything.

Yet another reason is that while screen-based emacs and x-windows emacs are very similar in what you can configure, they are not exactly the same, and I prefer to maintain a single internal knowledge base of modifications that work, and very similar (or even identical) .emacs files for desktop, regular laptop, and mini throwaway laptop.

And there are other reasons still. There are a few pieces of software I'd prefer to have handy. For example, I like Nautilus more than Midnight Commander for file management (not that I do much of that on this small laptop).

And all this is a long and winding way to get to a fun piece of emacs advice for you. Color themes.

Adjusting the color of various bits and pieces of the emacs window, including your background and font colors, is fairly easy (the emacs wiki provides information on the variables and how to set them). In fact, I would say that this is an area where hand coding the settings you want to use all the time in your .emacs file is easier than messing around with the quasi menu-driven emacs configuration system (under "Options - Customize" if you use the menu) where you would need to have a rather demented view of how things work to find these seemingly basic options.

But there is an even easier way: color themes.

The short version is this:

Alt-X color-theme-select

This gives you a "menu" (a buffer with a list) of themes. Put the cursor on a theme and hit enter, and watch the magic! I usually use something called "charcoal black" but there are a number of other excellent themes. A fun one is wordperfect (white on blue). Oh hell, they're all fun.

What is really cool about the emacs color themes that show up when you type in the above command is that they were all designed to pretty much ruin any semblance of an x windowing system or a regular graphical user interface. Anyone looking over your shoulder at any of the themes lacking a white background will think they are looking at a 1970s style terminal that some CS student spent all semester fiddling with. Except, since you are using the GUI, the text up close will be pretty clean and you'll enjoy writing on the terminal.

I don't know, but I'm guessing that changing around the colors now and then helps with eye strain, if you get that. I don't, so I don't know. But, as all writers know, sometimes changing the kind of pen you use or the kind of paper you write on (figuratively, of course, those technologies have not been used in decades) is good for the process. This is a way to do that.

But wait, there's more. You probably need to install something. The wiki page on this technique is here, and it may instruct you to get this .el file which you will put in your emacs path (there's a .something folder in your home directory, something like .emacs.d, in which you put the file). Then, you will likely need to add some code to your .emacs file. It is all in the wiki. What you need to do specifically will depend on which version of emacs you are using, and who knows, by the time you see this perhaps themes will be built in.

gregladen Fri, 09/23/2011 - 16:40

Tags

emacs

Linux

I'm an EMACS dropout. I really, really did try to learn it, but at the time VI was wired into my brain and my fingers. I find, some 25 years after I first learned VI, and some 15 years after I stopped using it, that it's STILL wired into my fingers. This effect is particularly pronounced when I'm tired. Typing VI commands at 1:00 am when editing in Microsoft Word can produce some interesting results.

Karen, one of the emacs color themes is called "vi"

Of course, that's only the colors. There is a vi mode, I'm pretty sure. You need to stop using word in any event. No reason for it most of the time, really.

Karen, use VIWORD - a set of Word macros that makes a fair (but not close to complete) emulation of the most common vi commands.

I'm using gnome....

But these days, to give us some reasonably accurate idea of what you're talking about, it helps to specify Gnome 2 or 3? Big difference there.

Gnome 3? Never heard of it.

One of my colleagues refers to vi this way:
Isn't that the editor with two modes: one that beeps and one that corrupts. your files?

Kidding of course.
I use emacs now only for running R and sweave. I must be getting old

Thanks. This is interesting.

I wanted to check it out, but there is nothing called "color-theme-select", "color-theme", or "theme-select" on my system.

I have: custom-new-theme-mode, custom-theme-add-face, custom-theme-add-variable, custom-theme-merge-theme, custom-theme-visit-theme, customize-create-theme, disable-theme, enable-theme, and load-theme, none of which match your post.

Not a big deal, but confusing, as most emacs things are. I use it to write too, but I'll never understand even 5% of it, and lisp is absolutely not worth the trouble to learn (for me!).

Anyhow, thanks for the post. One more emacs mystery.

Dave: Go here and hit "download" on the side bar. Pick the preferred download type, get that folder. Put color-theme.el in your load path, and the folder of "themes" in there as well (i.e. in ~/.emacs.d/

Then, if you are using a recent emacs (i.e. 23) put this in your .emacs file:

(defun color-theme-face-attr-construct (face frame)
(if (atom face)
(custom-face-attributes-get face frame)
(if (and (consp face) (eq (car face) 'quote))
(custom-face-attributes-get (cadr face) frame)
(custom-face-attributes-get (car face) frame))))

and reload the .emacs file or restart emacs and it should mostly work.

The color theme picker will mess with your .emacs file, so if there is some font info in there already you could get some slighly strange results but shouln't be too bac.

Ultimately you'll want to just play with then then pick the one theme you want to really use and use the theme picker to help you find all the lisp code you need (inspect the contents of that "themes" folder!)

... Because the lack of State will always be ensured ... The Land Of Lisp

gregladen — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 19:42:55 +0000

... Because the lack of State will always be ensured ... The Land Of Lisp

How come nobody told me about this!!!!

I eagerly await my copy of Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!.

And while we are on the topic, Behold The Power of Regex: Emacs Lisp: Writing a Date Time String Parsing Function

gregladen Mon, 09/05/2011 - 15:42

Tags

emacs

Technology

"...Because the lack of State will always be ensured..."

Sounds like a libertarian's wet dream.

How come nobody told me about this!!!!

Because for the last 30yrs LISP has been used almost exclusively by CS professor's to legally torture their students.

Lisp doesn't actually lack state, it's an impure functional language with mutable data types. Haskell, on the other hand, is pure lambda calc, and only simulates stateful computation through monads.

Every Object swellls with State; all is Pious, all is Great.

-- From Handel's opera Solomon

Real Men edit in Teco, anyway.

emacs for writers: org mode

gregladen — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:10:56 +0000

emacs for writers: org mode

After a little messing around with interesting emacs goodies, we might as well get right on to the good stuff.

emacs uses a concept called "modes." You'll learn about that if you use emacs. For now, what you need to know is that there are "major modes" and "minor modes" and we're only interested in major modes at this moment. There are several major modes that make emacs highly useful for specific purposes, and some of those modes are designed with writing in mind, such as the text-mode the outline-mode and what is known as muse-mode. But writers really want to use org-mode and not much else.

I use org-mode and html-mode for everything.

Emacs decides what mode to operate in using three different methods. The easiest and most obvious is using the extent ion of the file. This is totally configurable and you can have any extension invoke any mode, but one would normally, and by default, have emacs run in org-mode for a file with .org as the extension, and html mode for a file with .html as the extension. The second way is to have a hint in the file itself, something in the header that tells emacs to override any extensions and use a certain mode for that file. The third method is simply to tell emacs, as the user, what to do. No matter what file is open in emacs, you can invoke any major mode to operate on it (well, there may be some esoteric exceptions to that, even dangerous ones, but I can't think of any offhand.)

Org mode is intimidating and scary and much, perhaps most of what it does will not be useful to the average user. (Or, you can use all of its features and organize your life that way... there are people who do that.) But there are some really useful things you can do with it. First and foremost for the average writer is this: You can use some basic markdown when you write (stars to designate chapter or section headings, symbols to indicate lists, basic typesetting indicators for italics, bold, etc.) and when you are ready, you press a few easy to remember keystrokes and wham, you've got yourself a PDF file all nice and formatted. The PDF file will include things you don't want (like a Table of Contents, for instance) but there is an easy way to configure all of that. There is even a way to transform your text file into a word doc.

The point is, org mode is writing-friendly and then has a handful of very powerful tools. It is writing friendly simply because it is plain text and that is the friendliest way to write. Everything else is typesetting.

Org mode is also good at making hierarchical lists with checkboxes that keep track of what is done, and special checkboxes that count other checkboxes. I keep a list of all the stuff I want to write, so whenever I sit down to write I can see what I should be doing (or spend time adding or removing things from the list). So, right now, part of my list looks like this:

And in a few moments I'll check off that box you see there next to the org mode post. The top of my list looks like this:

And you can see that I've done 16 (well, now, almost 17) items out of 163 that are on my list, which I've only just recently given a thorough editing. When I check off the org-mode post by putting my cursor on that item and typing Ctrl-c Ctrl-c (or typing in the X if I feel like it) this number [16/163] will change to reflect the completion of one item to become [17/163]

About 30 of the items are weekly or monthly obligations I just put on the list so I can check stuff off. I like the list to be long and have very few things done on it. Then I don't have to worry that I'm going to run out of stuff to say.

Org-mode does a lot more than I'm telling you about here, but I wanted to give you just a few highlights. The manual and other documents can be found here, and if you want to learn even more, then just click here.

gregladen Fri, 07/22/2011 - 03:10

Tags

emacs

Thanks for the tip; I'll definitely check it out. *sigh* I guess I'll be installing Xemacs after more than 10 years of being emacs-free. I had a peek at the org ref card and was instantly reminded of the emacs manual. Oh, such wondrous mystical keystrokes!

@MadScientist: You may want to install a "real" emacs instead of Xemacs. I guess that Xemacs is different enough that some emacs-lisp files don't work properly in subtle ways. I use emacs 23 on both Windows and Linux.

I love org-mode, it's the first scheduling/task software that worked for me. Org-mode is one of the two reasons that I use emacs. Writing in LaTeX is the other. In emacs it's *so* much easier than any other environment.

Thanks for the tip John; I dumped xemacs and am installing emacs23. Xemacs just demonstrated that I was mistaken to believe that nothing was uglier than the xfig interface.

Oh, and org-mode paired with Dropbox is fantastic.

I'm pretty sure all the reasons one might have chosen Xemacs are obviated in current emacs.

org mode plus dropbox is the perfect way to have your cloud and eat it too.

Thanks for the tip on org-mode. I haven't explored it before and the orgtbl minor mode seems useful for editing dokuwiki tables (after I set up macros for converting wiki tables to org tables and vice versa). Though there are probably other ways.

(I use the It's All Text! addon in firefox so I can edit textarea boxes with emacs.)