Author Archive

Some interesting sorting algorithms

Walking back from Falafels today with CS majors, we somehow began discussing strange sorting algorithms. A good sort to know (not really) is bead sort. Imagine you have a bunch of beads on rods, like an abacus, and cross-wise they represent numbers. If you simply tilt the whole thing over, then gravity will let them […]

git-dude, meet hg-dude

Git-dude is a cool little thing. Given a directory of git repos, it continually fetches updates and displays a popup if you get any new commits. When I first saw it on Google Plus, somebody inexplicably commented, “This is a neat thing and I dont [sic] think there is a mercurial equivalent.” Given that Git […]

Why deterministic encryption algorithms do not satisfy multiple-message

Let’s say you have some private-key (symmetric-key) encryption scheme. It takes a key and a message, and outputs a ciphertext. Nobody without the key can decrypt the message using the decrypter. Is that secure? Not if it’s deterministic.

Steve Jobs: 1955–2011

It’s hard to put Steve Jobs into words, but I will forever remember him as a leader who didn’t let critics stop him from accomplishing so many things. We as a society tend to complain about Apple products being overhyped and to mock Apple’s “magical” and “revolutionary” labels, but the critics are uncomfortable because there’s […]

Cumulative Binomial Distribution

In my defense, I was trying to give an exact number.

iOS keycodes in Javascript

Here are the iOS keycodes for the keyDown and keyPress events in JavaScript as generated by an iPad running iOS 4.3.3:

WordPress permissions on NearlyFreeSpeech.net

“To perform the requested action, connection information is required.” My earlier post on WordPress with NearlyFreeSpeech.net was too hastily written. There are more issues than WP not wanting to use the direct upgrader, and editing WordPress code is not the right way to solve it either. Problem 1: WordPress doesn’t want to use the direct […]

Life-saving ability of major mobile devices

We’ve all known that Apple iDevices are superior to their competitors, but until now, we haven’t looked into a critical factor—their ability to save your life. To compile the following charts, a Google search was conducted for “X saved my life” where X is a value from the left side of the chart. The number […]

Configuring your phone for T-Mobile data

If your cellphone didn’t come preconfigured for T-Mobile (e.g. iPhone), you may need these APN settings to access the Internet: APN: internet2.voicestream.com Leave the username and password blank.

New web host

If you’re reading this, then the DNS changes have successfully propagated and you’re loading this page from my new hosting provider, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I’m dropping Site5 like a bad habit, and will soon be free of uncool mainstream shared hosting relatively soon. Although Site5’s control panel software went through a major revision recently, it was still […]