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 MOREI 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 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 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 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. […]
READ MOREBack a couple of months ago I set up a Posterous account as an experiment to see whether I could get anything between micro-blogging (Twitter) and macro-blogging (my main blog, using Windows Live Writer). Posterous was interesting because you compose a blog post as an email sent to a special email address, so it would work from my iPhone as well as from Outlook and Gmail. Worked pretty well, except for one thing: I could not cross-post my Posterous posts to my personal blog. They were arriving, but GraffitiCMS was rejecting them due to no category being present. So I shelved the experiment. […]
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