RSA, a public key cryptography algorithm, relies for its security on the fact that factorizing a number that is the product of two large primes is hard. Very hard. […]
READ MOREEver since I read Jeff Atwood's article about Swoopo on Coding Horror, I've been fascinated about the strategies involved in bidding on such a site. Not fascinated enough (or indeed interested enough) to actually use real money of my own to do so, but to my mind it has all the hallmarks of some kind of remarkable result in advanced game theory. Basically Swoopo is an auction site where they're the ones putting up the items for auction. The suckers -- sorry, bidders -- bid for the items, but each bid costs money to place (something like 75 cents) and each bid extends the end time of the auction. […]
READ MOREOne bug with Graffiti that's been driving me nuts ever since I started using the app over a year ago is that it assumes that a commenter will naturally add the http:// to the beginning of their website name. If they don't, the code that displays the comment later will force the URL to be absolute (essentially by prepending the Graffiti application's base URL to the name). Of course that link is then nonsense and leads to a 404 if someone clicks on it later. […]
I find this quite unbelievable, considering all the palava we went through for the Y2K cavalcade, but it seems that many systems around the world have been crashing or doing bizarre things once the first of January 2010 came around. […]
READ MOREColor me stupid, but then again I was under some emotional pressure at the time. The open source version of GraffitiCMS has some changes in it compared to the final official commercial release. Well, duh, I suppose; and of course I'd mentioned some of them in my previous blog post on the subject. […]
READ MOREFor some reason, I'm getting comment spam from essay and thesis mills, that is, those sites that promise to write an essay or thesis for you for cash. Given that the spam is barely legible English already -- the words are English but the syntax is dubious -- it's (a) not a great advert for the quality of the end-product should you partake of the service, and (b) frigging annoying to me. One of them was posted to my "Bye, Dad" post, not something that would endear me to the comment or commenter anyway. […]
READ MOREI write a monthly column for PCPlus, a computer news-views-n-reviews magazine in the UK (actually there are 13 issues a year — there's an Xmas issue as well — so it's a bit more than monthly). The column is called Theory Workshop and appears in the back of every issue. When I signed up, my editor and the magazine were gracious enough to allow me to reprint the articles here after say a year or so. After all, the PDFs do appear on each issue's DVD after a few months. When I buy the current issue, I'll publish the article from the issue a year ago. I popped over to B&N this lunchtime and bought the Christmas issue, so here's Christmas 2008's article. […]
READ MOREThose of you who follow me may have noticed a that I've been somewhat offline for the past week. The reason is that my father had a cardiac arrest overnight on Saturday/Sunday, 12/13 December, just over a week ago. Since then he's been in the Cardiac Care Unit at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough. I flew out from Colorado the next day, arriving the Tuesday, to see him. For the past week, I and my sister have been taking turns at looking after my mother and driving her to and from the hospital (it's over 90 minutes away). There's not been much time for being online, besides which I have to borrow a neighbor's broadband with which to do it. […]
READ MOREOnce GraffitiCMS had been posted as open source, I downloaded it with the intent of upgrading this site to it. There wasn't much news on the Graffiti CodePlex page about what had changed since the latest official release (1.2). In particular, no news whether any of the proposed plans from the beginning of the year had been implemented, partially or not. […]
READ MOREThis has got to be seen to be believed. When you email a multi-paragraph post to Posterous, it formats it, shall we say, differently than anything else I've seen. […]
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