a glob of nerdishness

I think I’ve figured out an easy way to keep track of my age through the coming journey. All I need to do is subtract year_born from year_current.

You’re smacking your forehead because they’ve been teaching this in school since way before year_born. Well, the school method of figuring age out involves annoying trifles like “have I had a birthday this year?”. I haven’t practiced answering that question enough to be very good at it; growing up, I just knew how old I was because it was somehow important. Not anymore.

I think my simplification will serve me well in the coming years. Since I don’t usually mentally increment year_current until about February anyway, my method has a good chance of being right without needing any conditional branches.

Via Jeff Atwood, “an excellent visual explanation of how JPEG works“. Includes both JPEG and JPEG 2000, with an emphasis on explaining the algorithms well.

Ok, I’ll admit I don’t know much about this, so I don’t entirely know how critical this is, but apparently SHA-1 has been cracked:

• The Epoch Times | Chinese Professor Cracks Fifth Data Encryption Algorithm
• Slashdot has some interesting comments regarding the reliability of The Epoch Times, the fact that this happened 2 years ago, that SHA-1 isn’t in itself an encryption scheme, and that problems with SHA-1 were already known: Chinese Prof Cracks SHA-1 Data Encryption Scheme
• Wikipedia has some more information about SHA, including mention that MD5 and SHA-1 are reportedly compromised: SHA hash functions

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