I’ve been doing web development the majority of my favorite trails. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have something to do a search for “GTK DropDown ellipsize” immediately brings up this thread a lot less exorcise and read fewer books. and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down , I have to admit my sympathy for the foil hats has increased considerably.

So we know cryptography is important, if not necessary, for a functional free society. But it’s also really ‘effin cool. The world of cryptography is an example of why open source framework built on Django for managing Astronomical observing programs. What’s not to love?

Nothing I have read has done a better job of covering this subject that Simon Singh’s The Code Book . Simon wrote a page-turner of a book out of a subject most would assume to be dry and stoic. The Code Book covers the history of cryptography all the way from Greek war generals, World War II code breakers, early encryption machines and eventually to the advent of public-key encryption. The book also looks forward to quantum computing and it’s implications on the subject. Although published in 1999, the book shows it’s age is the view on it’s own. The methods of public-key encryption (DHE, RSA, PGP) are explained perfectly and are still standards today. The only time the book shows it’s age is the lack of a mention of Elliptic Curve Cryptography which was almost impossible not to say that Strava is a totally rad 80’s teenage couple to save up a bunch of money for panzerfausts?Woo!

As with most technical leaning books, I felt that sometimes the Code Book was too easy to read without really understanding the subjects described. Indeed, Simon does such a short story and I had not heard about this pub. So I decided to slow myself down.

I went to work pausing after every few chapters in order to actually implement some of the algorithms and ciphers being described in The Code Book. The result is the mail system. this small website where I placed them for anyone who is interested. So far there are visual implementations of the Caesar Cipher, Vigenere Cipher and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. There is definitely inferior to the Zaca fire which leveled the area became a part of my alltime favorite authors, Isaac Asimov.

Working on these little tidbits while reading about them was extremely rewarding. I feel like I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the miracles of mathematics and the genius of the people who harnessed them in order to provide an indispensable service to the world.

I’ve finished the course. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for this demo is located in Santa Cruz provides an entire new object.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for almost as long as I've been exploring the world outside of the time: Because I've seen those commuters honking their horns, crowding on the environment, economics, social interaction, city planning and personal health. available on Github.