To all my readers, I hope you have a very festive holiday, filled with joy, happiness and the odd beer or two!
Merry Christmas!
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A Titan Rests
It is a sad day amonst the computer programming community as reports about the death of Dennis Ritchie surface. The co-creator of Unix, and the genius behind the C language, has left behind a huge legacy and throughout his life, affected the development of computer systems as we know them.
I will leave you with a humble tribute and his own personal biography.
A true 'Titan of Industry' - creator of the C language and co-creator of the UNIX Operating System.
Farewell DMR.
Social tools for an ageing community
At 15:00 today I finished my eight hour shift and came home only to then spend the next eight hours tinkering with my website development projects.
I am currently developing a website for my mum’s business (24 Carrot Cuisine) and I my idea is to create a community around the website for like minded people to interact with one another. Therefore my community is currently centred around a forum and a chat room. However, this has now got me thinking, many of the businesses target audience are aged between 29 and 60 – a huge age span with varying degrees of computer literacy across the spectrum. I now have the problem of ensuring that a touch-typing city slicker of only 30 can use the websites community features just as well as the retired headmistress whos only interaction with modern computing devices stems from her grandchildren showing off their latest acquisitions. Therefore I pose my question out to the world wide web:
- How do you ensure social interaction across a broad demographic?
- Is it possible that age has little effect on a web-based persona?
- Is there a golden rule to building an online community?
Do we need to replace AES?
The Advanced Encryption Standard replaced the highly acclaimed, and then widely rejected, Data Encryption Standard (DES) years ago and so far, it has stood the test of time with not one reported breach through the use of crypt-analysis. Although AES has been been breached several times in theory, it is merely just on paper and when the challenge is put to the theorists, the actual implementation is either too costly or takes far to long, to ever be worthwhile. However…
Earlier this month security experts developed a new way of recovering the encryption key for AES encrypted online banking data. Again this breach attempt is only theoretical and has taken three scientists a while to discover using long-term crypt-analysis, but its reporting has sparked a wave of discussion from leading computer mathematicians. The theory appears to be correct and its implementation feasible in years to come.
Fun College Course
Admittedly, this is a very old article from way back in 2009, but it’s as relevant as ever.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2009/0111-engineering_students_rock.htm
I wish I could have taken this class as part of my computing A-Levels.
