I’ve been doing a reasonable amount of Clojure development recently and like a lot of other Lisp dialect have marveled at the ease of separately pulling out the keys and values from a map. This is a very common operation after all, but C++ does only appear to support manual key or value extraction from a std::map.

Obviously the code isn’t hard to write. In C++11, the following function will return a vector of all keys in a map:

Some security researchers from UCSD showed a proof of concept exploit via one of the dongles that appears to be also used by car insurance companies to monitor your driving “to give you discounts for good driving”. I’m not really a fully paid up subscriber of the tin foil hat brigade but stuff like this makes me glad that I’m still opting for the old-fashioned way of paying for car insurance. Of course the fact that over half our fleet is too old to be OBD-II compliant may have some bearing on that as well…

Another metablogging post, but this may come in handy for people who like to produce blog posts in bulk and schedule them for publication in WordPress at a later date.

In my case, my ability to find time to blog is directly correlated to my workload in my day job. That’s why you see regular gaps in my posting that may last for a few weeks to a month or two.

I’ve recently blogged about adding TLS support to Emacs 24.5 on Windows and improving git performance on Windows by installing an alternative git command line client. The reason I ended up investigating how to add SSL and TLS support to Emacs is that when I originally upgraded from the official git Windows client to the Git for Windows build, I ended up with non-working TLS support in Emacs.

The TLS issues only occur if you tell the git installer to add git and all supporting Unix utilities to the path, which is not the default setting for a git installation on Windows.

Looks like Samsung and Google recognise that much like any other computing device, the smartphone in your pocket needs very regular security updates.

I’m glad to see that these vendors are stepping up to the plate and start publishing monthly patches. Let’s hope that the carriers are also going to do their part and let the updates through quickly

I’ve blogged about improving the performance of Git on Windows in the past and rightly labelled the suggested solution as a bad hack because it requires you to manually replace binaries that are part of the installation. For people who tend to use DVCSs from the command line, manually replacing binaries is unlikely to be a big deal but it’s clunky and should really be a wakeup call for some people to include a newer base system.

The Windows build of Emacs 24.5 doesn’t ship with SSL and TLS support out of the box. Normally that’s not that much of a problem until you are trying to access marmalade-repo or have org2blog talk to your own blog via SSL/TLS.

Adding SSL and TLS support to the Windows builds of Emacs is easy. SSL/TLS support in the official Emacs build for Windows isn’t enabled because it doesn’t ship with the necessary support libraries, but you can get pre-built binaries from the ezwinports project on Sourceforge. Installation is simple - grab the desired binaries (I used gnutls, but there’s also an older openssl build available) and extract them into the root directory of your Emacs install. The directory layout is the same and mimics the standard Unix directory layout so everything ends up in the correct place.

tl;dr - avast’s web shield functionality appears to insert itself into SSL connections using a self signed trusted root certificate and a simple kind of man-in-the middle “attack” on SSL. I would recommend you turn off web shield’s https scanning or choose another virus scanner.

I read about this on a blog post that was linked from Hacker News where someone claimed that Avast’s virus scanner for Mac OS inserts itself into SSL-encrypted connections using a self-signed certificate. A quick check on a Windows machine in my household confirmed that this was also true for Windows:

As mentioned in an earlier post, I changed my blogging workflow to org2blog for writing and editing posts in Emacs and only push them up to my WordPress blog when the posts are almost done. I still do the final editing in WordPress so I can tweak the SEO settings and all that, but the majority of the work happens in org-mode now.

One area that really needed improving was the appearance of the source code that I put in posts. Before I started using org-mode for blogging I edited the code in Emacs, ran it through htmlize and pasted it into my blog post.. That way the Emacs theme I’m using also determined what the generated HTML looked like and it allowed me to control the code’s appearance to a certain extent. Once I moved to org-mode, I just got a generic htmlize output.

Yes, I know Ubuntu and Xubuntu already come with Chromium in their official package repositories, but sometimes it does help to have the official/commercial version installed in addition to the Open Source one. I actually both installed right now, plus Firefox and Vivaldi. You could almost think I’m some sort of web developer or something.

The Google Chrome installation instructions for 14.04 on Ubuntu Portal also work fine for 15.04 with one wrinkle. If you use the installation via PPA method, you need to run the following command to actually install the stable version of Chrome: