First, and most importantly, you have until tomorrow at 11:15 CST to sign up for the eightfivethree pick’em AND get your picks in. Rachel says I have to put what prizes I will be giving away this year, so let me tell you what you will be playing for: 1g and 1 green iron bracer sent via standard mail. I won’t win this year, unless the Big 12 dominates. But since I won last year, it would be hard for me to expect people to come back year after year just to lose.
<p>Also, I saw <a href='http://www.rubyonrails.com/'>Ruby on Rails</a> yesterday. WOW! I need to take some time to learn this. This could cut development time by amazing amounts. Have you tried <a href='http://www.basecamphq.com'>Basecamp</a>? I am guessing not, but Ruby on Rails was developed by them somehow and Basecamp is quite a work of art.</p>
<p>I am really busy right now. I have a paper/presentation next week over a topic somewhat related to “the u.s. law and encryption”, or rather, “how you know when you have broken the law.” It is pretty fun trying to learn what programmers can and can’t do, but just recently the government loosened its grip on the powerful munition of encryption. So really, it is quite open (which is VERY IMPORTANT), but make for a boring report and even more boring presentation. The DMCA, however, is full of stuff you can legally do as a researcher/programmer, but will still certainly get sued over and therefore not actually get to do it.</p>
<p>Rachel and I have been renting Nip/Tuck and Deadwood from Blockbuster (joined the all you can watch per month) this past week. Both fun shows. It is so much nicer watching the shows on DVD. No commercials and you can watch them whenever you want. I have a feeling this is going to catch on.</p>
<p>I downloaded all 2.6 GB of <a href='http://www.sxsw.com'>SXSW</a> showcase music via bittorrent recently. It took something like 5 days to do so and there is way too much music to listen to. Hopefully I will find some indie band to like so everyone thinks I am sooooo cool since I like music that no one has ever heard of. Plugging all the songs into iTunes was pretty cool. I can select the album and then the genre that I want to listen to. It was a sad moment when I first listened to ‘Country.’ WHY DO I LIKE COUNTRY? It hurts just to say that (sorry to all you country fans, nothing wrong with it, it is just that when I tell people that I have to buy my music out of the country section they immediately ask me what I think Junior’s – Earnheart Jr. that is – chances at this weekends race are. And there is something wrong with NASCAR – I won’t apologize for that). I’ll keep you posted on my SXSW music findings.</p>
You may have already seen this. [http://www.computerweekly.com/Article137173.htm?src=rssITMAN] It’s an artical about researchers in China breaking the SHA-1 (SSL) encryption code.
I’d heard about this in class, but I also heard they were not sure if it really had been broken.
Kind of funny, but I actually did try Basecamp awhile ago. Not much I can do with it now of course, but it’s really nicely designed. I’ve wanted to play around with Ruby after I read about it on http://www.37svn.com, but I don’t really have a place to install it at the moment.