Posts Categorized: Uncategorized

Limit Texas Hold’Em is a variety of poker which is less popular than the standard unlimited Texas Hold’Em. But also easier to solve. Researchers have figured out a program which plays better on average than anyone else. If your definition doesn’t include winning as much money as possible. Calling it solved means that they accomplished this by… Read more »

Some people have too much time on their hands and do awesome things with it. Koala_Steamed on YouTube posted a video of a working Redstone Word Processor. It is essentially an 8-bit computer which takes keyboard input and displays information on a screen. It has memory, and storage.

RaiderSec has an older article on how major browsers store passwords. Before anyone pontificates about how terrible of a job these browsers did, I’d like to point out the impossibility of encrypting something when all encryption keys are on disk. Firefox allows you to set a master password, at which point your passwords are stored fairly… Read more »

Open Whisper systems has partnered with WhatsApp to roll out end-to-end encrypted messaging! I’m tempted to start using this once I hear more confirmation from security experts that it is actually fairly well done. If you aren’t familiar with encryption, this means that your device encrypts the message before passing it to the receiver. Since… Read more »

The EFF strikes again. They are working on an open Certificate Authority which they hope starts to get all websites encrypted by default. I’m looking forward to this coming out! I have been using StartSSL for my personal sites (including this blog), but they have restrictions on using their certs for sites which accept payment and such…. Read more »

I’m trying to figure out ways to get off of Facebook, and one of the things I use it for is to share stuff I find interesting. I doubt anyone else finds it interesting, so this blog is a much better location anyway. I’ll try to post links, sometimes with commentary. Content will be far ranging… Read more »

I’ve been wondering lately about change and how to better manage it. Particularly in the computer world, change is frequently accompanied by howls of rage by some people and tacit approval by others. In trying to understand this, I realized that people are frustrated by change when it violates an understood contract. This contract may… Read more »

I spent the better part of today struggling with Rails while upgrading some old code. Documenting this here in order to hopefully save others the time. In a case where you have three tables, e.g. Wizard, Dungeon, and DungeonWizard, where DungeonWizard is the join table, you cannot make the foreign keys in DungeonWizard constrained to… Read more »

Documenting this in case someone else runs across it. I just had a weird issue where if I ran cd / in my Mac OS X bash shell, the shell closed. It happened if I cd‘ed to any directory outside of my home directory structure. In my case, I figured it out when I opened… Read more »

Gene Veith points out an interesting article by Matthew Sigler, a “ThD candidate in liturgical studies at Boston University where his work has focused on the history of Methodist worship as well as lyrical theology. In addition to being a student, he has served for the past twelve years as a music minister in the church.”… Read more »