Discrete logarithm problem...

Discrete logarithm problem ... not so solved after all :)  A few days ago, I blogged about a breakthrough in solving certain kinds of discrete logarithm problems.  I wasn't sure about how relevant this was to commonly used cryptographic building blocks.  Friend and former colleague Doug W., who has lots of experience with cryptographic implementations in hardware and software, wrote to say that we was skeptical about the applicability to those building blocks.  Now Bruce Schneier has weighed in: not very relevant.

A dog's perspective...

A dog's perspective...  Take one dog.  Add a GoPro.  Three and a half minutes later, you have a delightful view of a dog's world.  The tongue is definitely the main character of this short :)  In every scene – running through the grass, running through the woods, drinking from a stream, and fetching a stick – the tongue is playing its part...

Scars of WWI remain, 100 years later...

Scars of WWI remain, 100 years later...  The giant crater at right, almost 70 feet deep, is Lochnagar Crater in northern France, formed by a large mine in the Battle of the Somme.  More photos here.

I've been surprised, in my travels around Europe, just how many remnants and ruins of both WWI and WWII remain.  Sometimes these are deliberately preserved as monuments and memorials, but most often they simply haven't been removed or repaired.  I've traveled much less extensively in Asia, but there also it was easy to find remnants of WWII...

Good news?

Good news?  As always, I'm not entirely sure how to interpret the Google unemployment index.  It's derived from counts of searches related to unemployment, so it's a very indirect measurement of something not easy to define in the first place (especially given the politically-motivated “adjustments” to published government data).  Whatever this index is (or isn't) measuring, it's dropped substantially in recent weeks, to levels not seen since mid-2008 (screen capture at right; click to embiggen).  Somehow that feels encouraging :)

Wrong again, Internet!

Wrong again, Internet!  Did you know that pissing on a wound (to clean it out!) is advice you can find on the Internet?  I didn't, but some quick googling provides proof.  I have heard people tell me that urine was sterile, but I knew that to be wrong from my own adventures with a microscope as a kid (it's easy to see the bacteria in urine).  I didn't know the rest of the story, though...

Geek: healthcare.gov source code...

Geek: healthcare.gov source code...  Weeks ago I started seeing news sites talking about healthcare.gov having 500 million lines of code.  That's a crazy number, way higher than any reasonable estimate, and I didn't bother to repeat it as I thought it was likely bogus.  Now we have a report from a programmer on the project, saying that there are 3.74 million lines of code underlying healthcare.gov, and offering a breakdown by code type (at right).  That's a far more believable number!

While one could debate whether CSS and XML are “programming languages”, it's certainly true that all the things listed are the typical work product of programmers on a project like healthcare.gov.  The ratios look about right, too, except that I'm a little surprised that the JavaScript component is so (relatively) small.  The dominance of Java on the server side is entirely typical of a large corporate project these days.  I'm somewhat relieved by the absence of Basic, .NET and C++.  I'm also a little surprised that a government contractor didn't manage to sneak in some proprietary language (like CMS) or some off-the-wall or obsolete language (like Forth or Prolog).

None of the above should be taken to imply that the healthcare.gov software was well-specified, well-designed, or well-implemented.  In fact, I think we can assume that none of those things are true, given how badly the system bombed on rollout, and how much of it remains to be implemented.  All this information does is to say that the implementation isn't completely, overtly, insanely crazy...

A masterpiece of a museum...

A masterpiece of a museum...  Peggy Noonan likes the new 9/11 museum...

Planting the corn used to be so simple...

Planting the corn used to be so simple...  Now it involves $400,000 computer-driven tractors, advanced geolocation systems far more accurate than GPS, computer-controlled seed drills, iPads, and software and data in the cloud.

There's not much corn planted here in Paradise.  The large fields here tend to be planted in forage crops, especially alfalfa and oats.  Even with these crops we're starting to see some hi-tech innovations.  Yesterday, for example, I watch a ginormous tractor spraying an oat field.  The spray booms extended roughly 50' on each side of the tractor, and I saw individual nozzles being turned on and off (presumably by computer) to avoid double-spraying or missing any piece of the crop...