I have updated the errata for my book, Modern Cryptanalysis.

I recently wrote a C version of a bunch of comparison-based sorting algorithms, notably timsort and quicksort.

There’s been some hubbub going around the web about Wordpress potentially suing a developer for breaching the GPL.

I’m a sucker for programming contests, and have been since high school.

I thought I would post here about one ongoing contest and one upcoming one.

When I was constructing my own websites, for myself or for clients, I was always bothered by one thing:

One of my favorite passions from my teenage days was assembly language programming. Don’t laugh.

It embodies a lot of my favorite things about programming: I have total control, it is clean and simple, and it is just and fast and functional as I am capable of making it. The only thing standing in the way of me and world domination is how well I can program.

Often, I like to read articles on particularly insightful programming techniques or algorithms. Sometimes these algorithms are for some fairly mundane things, like searching and sorting. (So mundane, of course, that Knuth wrote a whole book about it.)

Recently, I desired to have a simple Python function I could call with as little fuss as possible that would start up some kind of server that I could use to tell what is going on inside my program at a later date, without resorting to some kind of logging system or console output.

I recently read an interesting article (actually, the slides linked to) about the horror that is the Global Interpreter Lock in Python, especially with multicore CPUs. And I agree — in these cases, the GIL is painful.

I build and maintain web sites. I manage probably hundreds of online accounts or logins or passwords that I need access to semi-regularly. Organizing all of this information can be a bit of a pain.

I’ve been doing a lot of programming lately, and in a multitude of different languages. For the most part, these are pretty “decent” languages: C, Python, Ruby, etc. However, none of the languages really makes me happy.

As a follow-up to my previous post, I have found two ways of finding the distance between two cities in the US. One is slow and more correct, one is less slow and less correct.

Recently, I was thinking to myself, “Where do all of these wonderful sites on the web get information to map cities, towns, and US ZIP codes to actual locations?” I then though, “How much do they pay?” In reality, I don’t know the answer, though there seem to be many companies you can pay for the information.

I successfully moved this site from a Wordpress blog to scanty, with some modifications.

I decided to finally sit down and read the short story The Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft the other day. Turns out that it is pretty much in the public domain (this is actually a matter of some debate, but all the evidence I have found on the Internet seems to point pretty squarely that the copyrights expired long ago).

It’s been quiet here lately. I’ve had a lot of projects going on that occupy most of my time in the evenings and on weekends.

I never noticed it before, but many of the resources that I either own or would love to own regarding PDF, PostScript, MetaPost, etc., are all available for free online!