Frank Stajano’s presentation on security (and the recent Cambridge Stack Overflow Dev Day) was based on the premise that hustlers and scammers understand human psychology in a way that engineers do not, and so security engineers would do well to learn from how classic scams work.
Archive for November, 2009
Hustlers’ knowledge
Posted in arts and crafts, tagged artificial intelligence, Cambridge, embodiment, Frank Stejano, knowledge, psychology, Rodney Brooks, security, world on 17/11/2009| 1 Comment »
Block sorting
Posted in programming, tagged algorithm, David Wheeler, Michael Burrows, programming, Ruby on 04/11/2009| Leave a Comment »
This is the first step in the Burrows-Wheeler (bzip) compression algorithm. It doesn’t compress anything in itself, but re-orders the characters of the input in such a way that they will then be easy to compress:
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My first Ruby program
Posted in programming, tagged algorithm, Michael Foord, Peter Norvig, programming, Ruby on 01/11/2009| 1 Comment »
I thought I’d have a crack at learning Ruby. Strictly speaking this isn’t my first encounter, and so my title isn’t quite true, since a few years ago I did work through the “Rolling with Ruby on Rails” tutorial on the O’Reilly site. But as I was just copying and pasting code from a website, that doesn’t really count. (My opinion of Rails at the time was that barring some quibbles about the JSP-like HTML generation it seemed to be very good for the sort of thing it was aimed at, but that I was very happy not to be doing that sort of thing for a living.)
I’ve decided not to learn the language by buying a book or working through tutorials or suchlike. Instead, the plan is just to re-write tiny programs that I find interesting for any reason, relying on nothing much but whatever online reference documentation I can find together with my acquaintance with Perl and Python. This isn’t likely to be the best way of learning, but I want to see how far I can get with it.
rdn32 