FOB

Somebody cold-emailed me today asking about how video games are created. I drew the implication that they might want to develop games themselves. Here's what I replied…

My students and I have been rooting for the gEDA project for a long time. This toolsuite is supposed to automate the design and layout of printed circuit boards, providing an alternative to wacky and expensive proprietary EDA tools…

I'm still bitter about the Pirate Haiku contest…

Recently, we at PSAS are likely to have been the first ever to successfully use 802.11 as a rocket telemetry system. I posted an article about this to /., but was rejected. So I'll post here, and hope that folks are duly impressed…

Yesterday I got to find out I've been an idiot for many years. It's one of those things where I knew everything brilliantly except for one simple fact…

A blogger recently posted a challenge for programmers of languages with first-class continuations: use them to construct a Prolog-like constraint satisfaction construct that works by saving choice points. Of course, I can't resist this kind of thing…

Part 1 of this series sketches out some basic structure underlying network trust establishment. I wanted to take a moment to comment on the motivating examples I've seen in the last couple of days…

I haven't touched /. in a week or two now. I doubt I'll ever bother to again. This is the culmination of years of faithful reading, posting, commenting and moderating. I'm pretty sad that it has come to this—in fact, I had hung on a lot longer than common sense tells me is wise. You had me, Slashdot, but you lost me…

I just re-read an ancient article referenced on reddit.com entitled How We Learned to Cheat at Online Poker: A Study in Computer Security. The article points up that computer shuffling is hard to get secure in this situation, and illustrates three seperate bad security flaws in the algorithm used by a popular computer Poker site in 1999. Unfortunately, it then goes on to suggest a "secure" shuffle that actually is quite insecure…

Excellent. I've got a total of about 10 legitimate outside comments over the whole time this blog has been up. A few weeks ago, I made it possible to comment anonymously. Today, some pathetic excuse for a human being spammed advertising comments onto the head entry on the site 4 times. So it's spammers 4, good folks 10. Could be worse, I guess…