my tweets skh:tec
On 21 May
I am presenting at the
BGLUG meeting.
The topic will be Haiku.
I was an ardent BeOS fan/user for a while during their early Developer and Release days, and was among the saddest* to see them disappear as a company, and then even more saddened when Palm totally blew their chance to really run with the platform.
I’ll post the slides I use after the meeting.
*wrote that about 8 years ago
As recently promised, here is my review of Bruce Schneier’s seminal work, Applied Cryptography (2d edition).
I received my now-signed copy of Applied Cryptography (2d ed) for my 16th birthday – about a year after it was published.
Of all the “odd” books I asked-for when I was younger, this single volume had to take the cake for being both the most expensive, and the least-likely-to-be-read of any.
Bruce Schneier is a world-renowned cryptographer, researcher, and generally Smart Guy™. He has written several other books (many of which I have read (Beyond Fear, Practical Cryptography, Secrets and Lies), and several I own). I also follow on an intermittent basis his blog: schneier.com.
A warning before I go any further – since this book has not been updated in 15+ years, many of the technologies outlined now look incredibly dated or quaint (a 100Mhz processor being “top of the line”, for example). Likewise, measuring computational feasibilities in MIPS-years seems bizarre to me… then again, I’ve never used a MIPS processor.
Back to the book. A lot of time and space is spent on the mathematics and theory behind crypto systems: which is quite cool… except when you don’t understand any of it (as I didn’t a dozen+ years ago [and still don't to some extent now]). Protocols for a variety of “interesting” activities are discussed: key exchange, digital cash, contract signing, digital signatures, etc.
The most interesting part of the book is the appendix containing C code for several of the algorithms in the book.
Schneier’s writing mixes the highly technical with the amusing (eg p157):
Another biological approach is to use genetically engineered cryptanalytic algae that are capable of performing brute-force attacks against cryptographic algorithms. These organisms would make it possible to construct a distributed machine with more processors because they could cover a larger area. The plaintext/ciphertext pair could be broadcast by satellite. If an organism found the result, it could induce the nearby cells to change color to communicate the solution back to the satellite.
Assume the typical algae cell is the size of a cube 10 microns on a side (this is probably a large estimate), then 1015 of them can fill a cubic meter. Pump them into the ocean and cover 200 square miles (518 square kilometers) of water to a meter deep (you figure out how to do it – I’m just the idea man).
In the intervening time, AES has been adopted as a national standard, replacing DES. We all rely on encryption in daily life on the web (https) when banking, making purchases, or even reading our facebook and twitter accounts. Cryptography has become ubiquitous and invisible to most of us. The product I work most heavily with relies on certificate-based https for all of its internal communication.
In my opinion, this book is still of immense value – though in a different way than it was in the mid 90s: now it’s to serve as a warning about relying on technology and not considering the source, rather than upon how to implement and promulgate that technology.
Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician, philosopher, and part-time theologian, is a fascinating member of history to me.
Several years ago I borrowed a copy of his “Pensées” from a friend, and skimmed it. At the time, I was impressed more with the randomness of the collection than with anything specific he wrote.
A few days ago, I began re-reading the book from the free Kindle edition on my phone.
There are far too many awesome quotes to repost them all here, but I have been heavily highlighting my digital edition for future reference, using in conversation, etc.
Pensées looks like a weird cross between 17th century twittering and a diary – but it’s well-worth the $0.00 investment to have a copy.
My interest in cryptography has extended, now, for more than 15 years. The first book I read on the topic was David Kahn’s seminal work, The Codebreakers. Several years later, I received a copy of the book for Christmas, which I promptly reread.
Kahn’s writing style is eminently inviting, sucking the reader into an extensive history of code making and breaking over the centuries. Much of his time is spent going over the work of the Bletchley Park researches during WWII. It is truly astounding to see how much was going on “behind the scenes” compared to the popular historical works which only focus on the fighters on the ground, the strategic decisions made, or the technology enabling victory (or drawing it out, as the cases may be).
If you are interested in learning more about the work of the “intellectuals” during WWII, or about codes in general, it is an excellent work. For more of the theoretical aspects of modern cryptography, I’d suggest Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier*. But for a general history, in a style sure to appeal to even those who hate nonfiction and histories, David Kahn’s work is unmatched.
* to be covered in a forth-coming review
For several months (I guess, more accurately, “years” now) I have been contributing to Stanford’s folding@home project. That’s my team I just linked-to (88135).
If you’re interested in donating your spare CPU cycles to a pretty worthy cause, I’d invite you to join my team 
I realized earlier this week that it’s been 19 years since I first started programming. Not my first exposure to computing, which was in about 1986 on my aunt’s Mac 512 .. but still a long time ago
My aunt gave me a Tandy 102 laptop that had a whole walloping 21446 bytes of storage. It had the capability to store up to 19 files, and the names had to be in a 6.2 form (ie, not the “standard” DOS 8.3 naming convention).
It shipped with MS BASIC somethingorother, and had a 40 character wide by 8 character tall screen. Oh, and don’t forget the built-in 300 bps modem (that ‘rotary’ dialed)!
I learned BASIC from Learning BASIC for the Tandy by David A Lien. I learned a LOT from that book – not the least of which was that color doesn’t work on a monochrome screen
I also learned how pseudorandom numbers can be “manipulated” to help you win games .. and that typos suck : mightily.
Some of my programming habits that I still carry (even in writing “throwaway” scripts), come from my time of writing programs on an extremely limited machine.
After playing with BASIC for a year or so, I started writing for my aunt’s old Mac iiVX (which had 5MB RAM and an 80MB hard disk!) using Microsoft QuickBASIC 1.0 (a compilable BASIC), then moved into Turbo Pascal for a couple months, and then into C++ in 1993. My introduction to C++ was in the form of working with a family friend from church who wanted to learn C++ (but knew C), and who wanted to try-out some ideas he had for work with finite element analysis software. So we (I built the mesh generator/parser, and acted as syntax fiend) built a FEA application using Borland C++ 4.0 on his 486 running Windows 3.11 for workgroups. That was a screamer compared to my little laptop: it ran at 66Mhz, and had 16MB RAM! Wow: those were the days
My cell phone has more RAM than that now, and a faster CPU, to boot!
I know I didn’t start as long ago, or as young, as some of my friends, colleagues, and cofiends – but there’s my story
I hadn’t paid attention to all the things that have to be setup when you move in such a short period of time before: electric, gas, water, change of addresses… what a pain!
But it’s worth it since we’ll have more privacy, more space, and less-close neighbors
I have the electric set to switch over to my name this weekend: now I just need water, gas, banks… yay :-\
