Geeky comic
Posted by tpc at January 30th, 2010
Found another geeky comic called Abstruse Goose. Bad drawing, mathy, geeky, subversive not unlike xkcd. How to not like one who likes Abba and Star Wars?
Saw this via Juan de Mairena.
linux to windows
Posted by tpc at January 22nd, 2010
Every now and then I bump into some obstacles that made me glad that I spent the first two years of my undergraduate days in the now defunct computational science program, learning programming on linux machines. Add to that some experience with perl during my first job, using vi or regular expressions is not entirely alien to me. The obstacles mainly have to do with collaborating with people who work on linux.
The most recent one being sharing a tex source file, which when ftp-ed from linux to windows, ended up with a ^M character at the end of every line. The stupid tex editor (winshell) on the office pc couldn’t recognize it, treated it as a newline and as a result wouldn’t compile.
Some googling found the following solution in vim
:%s/^M//g
To get the ^M in vim for windows, type Ctrl+q+m. In unix it is, I think, Ctrl+v+m.
RSA 768 factored!
Posted by tpc at January 15th, 2010
Announcement here https://documents.epfl.ch/users/l/le/lenstra/public/papers/rsa768.txt.
It was done on 12 Dec 2009 using NFS.
If you visit the webpage of Laboratory for Crytologic Algorithms, part of the team that accomplished this feat, you’ll see that they actually test algorithms on a PS3 cluster. I wonder if the experiment results are ever undermined by students trying to hijack the PS3s to play games.
