Archive for category: Computer Science

A Simple Python Program for Factoring…

June 28, 2009 | Computer Science, Cryptography, Math | By: Mark VandeWettering

Sometimes, your interests converge. Over on Programming Praxis, he had a coding challenge to implement Monte Carlo factorization. The last couple of days, I have been thinking a bit more about factorization, so it seemed like a good idea to give it a whack. I cribbed a version of the Rabin Miller primality tester off […]

Taking my own code challenge…

June 22, 2009 | Cryptography | By: Mark VandeWettering

Back in 2007, I made a blog post entitled “Code Challenge”, where I put forth a code challenge. Code Challenge | brainwagon. Nobody took the challenge. But what was slightly odder was that I had no recollection of making this challenge, or even what type of cipher it was. The only clue that I had […]

Revisiting Simon Singh’s Cipher Challenge…

June 19, 2009 | Cryptography | By: Mark VandeWettering

The other day, my friend Jeff sent me an email detailing the latest benchmarking of his new 8 core Intel box. He had written a program to compute return rates for all possible draws in video poker. A few years ago, this program had taken a month of computer time to complete, and he wondered […]

Matt Blaze: Security and Human Behavior 2009

June 14, 2009 | Computer Science, Cryptography, Security | By: Mark VandeWettering

For all the people who’ve come to see this as my ham radio blog, I apologize, but I do have other interests, and computer security is one of them. It’s not that I am any kind of expert, but I have played around quite a bit with various bits of computer security and cryptography over […]

The Next 700 Programming Languages

June 10, 2009 | Computer Science, Programming Languages | By: Mark VandeWettering

I learned that computer scientist Peter Landin passed away recently. Landin’s research helped refine the direction of my college studies, and was always a great pleasure to read. His derivation and explanation of the SECD machine served as the basis for a more mature and clear understanding of many aspects of programming languages and their […]

Alpha-Beta Search is Hard To Debug

April 20, 2009 | Checkers, Computer Science | By: Mark VandeWettering

So, I’ve spent a few hours over the last couple weeks to try to debug milhouse, my computer checkers program that I tinkered together over the last few years. It’s kind of maddening, because in so many ways it seems to work, but it has a number of rather maddening behaviors which can only be […]

Using a PDP

February 11, 2009 | Computer Science, Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’ve been interested in old computers for quite some time, so I was pleased to run across this link: Using a PDP.

A Mathematical Theory of Communication

February 4, 2009 | Computer Science, Math | By: Mark VandeWettering

Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication is probably one of the most influential papers of the 20th century. It spawned the entire field of information theory. And, it’s available via the following link: A Mathematical Theory of Communication

TEMPEST: A Signal Problem – Hack a Day

January 27, 2009 | electronics, Security | By: Mark VandeWettering

I’m not 100% obsessed (more like 98%) with radio topics: this morning, I found this link on Hack a Day which provided a link to several articles having to do with TEMPEST. I’ve blogged about TEMPEST before, but for those who haven’t heard of it before, it’s a way of eavesdropping on electronic signals by […]

Arduino Realtime Audio Processing

January 15, 2009 | Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

The Arduino is a cheap little microcontroller, but you can use it to do some interesting audio effects. Check out the following Lab3 – Labor für experimentelle Informatik

Re-animating the PDP-11/70

December 16, 2008 | Computer Science, Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering

A few years ago, Tom Duff and I each wrote an emulator for the PDP-1 so we could play the original version of Space Wars! I learned a lot about old computers in the week or so it took me to do, and I must admit that I’ve retained a fascination for old computers ever […]

Barest of Bare Bones Arduino

December 9, 2008 | Hardware, Robotics | By: Mark VandeWettering

Here’s a way to turn an ATMEGA168 into an Arduino compatible controller with a minimum of external components. arduino-standalone « Conversations with spaces

Google Code University

December 1, 2008 | Computer Science | By: Mark VandeWettering

One of the greatest things about computing technology is simply how much information is available to anyone who is interested. Technical reports, papers, and most importantly, open source software tools are all available to whomever wants them. This represents a significant democratization of technology. Major universities like MIT are even making entire college level courses […]

Keyboard Acoustic Emanations Revisited

November 29, 2008 | Computer Security, Cryptography | By: Mark VandeWettering

While my blog has been dominated by radio related stuff lately, I do continue to be interested in lots of different subjects, including various topics related to computer security and codes. While scanning my feeds today, I found reference to this work, which I hadn’t seen before, but which I find interesting both for its […]

@ SIGGRAPH 2008

August 13, 2008 | Computer Graphics | By: Mark VandeWettering

Well, I’m sitting at The Standard (a frankly far too chic hotel for a forty something computer geek like myself), it’s not quite 7 A.M. and I spent my first day at SIGGRAPH. I’m hear mostly for the benefit of recruiting: sitting in the booth, answering questions and showing up at our Pixar User’s Group […]