Posted by Jonas Elfström
Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:50:00 GMT
There were no cross-platform windowing toolkits for Ruby so _why made one and he calls it Shoes. Not even close to 1.0, it's already yummy in a chunky kind of way and since it came from _why I simply had to try it out. Something simple.
Shoes.app :width => 1024, :height => 768 do
corners = [ {:x => 256, :y => 10}, {:x => 12, :y => 378}, {:x => 506, :y => 378} ]
xpos,ypos,c = 256,10,0
srand
2111.times do
c=rand(3)
xpos += (corners[c][:x]-xpos)>>1
ypos += (corners[c][:y]-ypos)>>1
star xpos, ypos, 5, 10
end
end
The result.
Posted in Ruby, Math | no comments
Posted by Jonas Elfström
Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:07:00 GMT
Recently I happened to see the FNV hash being mentioned. I had never heard of it before so I googled it and found the authors page but also a true gem. If you want a crash course in hash functions then I can recommend Mulvey's site.
Posted in Security | no comments
Posted by Jonas Elfström
Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:10:00 GMT
This company is presenting a smart card with built in display. I do not know the underlying protocol for making debit/credit card payments by smart card instead of using the magnetic stripe but if the protocol is sophisticated enough this could help blocking some of the known attacks of those. As Chip and SPIN points out the smart cards has some issues. One of them is that if the terminal is compromised you as a customer have no way to know that you are actually confirming the transaction you think you are while entering your pin code. If your smart card shows the amount, you could at least not be deceived into emptying your account.
Posted in Security | no comments
Posted by Jonas Elfström
Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:37:00 GMT
Three weeks ago lightning struck nearby. Today my ISP finally tried to change the switch in the central even though I reported back to them that my VSDL modem worked just fine at a friend’s house only a couple of days after my connection died.
Posted in Blogging | no comments
Posted by Jonas Elfström
Fri, 25 May 2007 16:31:00 GMT
The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer in the late sixties and maybe early seventies. He sent a number of letters to the press, including four ciphers or cryptograms and only one of them has been solved. The killer's identity remains unknown.
Chris McCarthy has a nice page about the cipher and he also has an ASCII version of the cipher.
Here's a small Ruby hack that calculates the character frequency using the ASCII version of the cipher. Feel free to use it if you like to have a go at cracking it!
EDIT: At this page you can have a go at cracking it real-time. I am not convinced it's really a homophonic substition cipher since the frequency analysis shows that the 340 does not have a flat frequency distribution.
It would be nice to know what cryptographic literature was available for the public in northern California in the late sixties.
Posted in Ruby, Cryptography | 2 comments
