Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

There are a bunch of amusing flash games at YETI SPORTS . I don’t think anyone at work is getting anything accomplished today

I have been mucking around a bit more with Wordpress. I am evaluating it because Moveable Type’s pricing makes it prohibitive for me to upgrade. I have been getting regular spam type messages here, and Moveable Type’s default interface for comment elimination isn’t great.

All in all, I have found WordPress pretty easy to use. It was really painless to import all the MT entries.

I am becoming more familiar with CSS, which seems to help too. I had a couple of difficulties regarding the install.

1. The install.php file came up blank initially. I solved this via some hints in the WP forums.
2. All comments were initially being moderated. I solved this by removing a blank line in the words to filter. I guess everything matches a blank line.

I haven’t figured out an easy way to map the RSS feeds to the same URLs they were before, so I’m not going to bother. I’m hoping self discovery solves the problems. Now I just need to learn a bit of php, and I should be good to go!

I just finished reading The Code Book by Simon Singh. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of cryptography, as well as the specifics of some of the techniques. It includes historical information from Egypt to modern day. I found the sections describing the Enigma engine particularly interesting, as well as the discussion of the recent history of RSA encryption and PGP. It is an easy read; you don’t have to be a mathematician nor a computer scientist to understand it. It will also help you how your web browser does encryption, and the relationship of the certifying authorities to web based encryption.

One of Wil Wheaton’s readers suggested providing GMail invites to the troops in Iraq so they can get movies and pictures from home. (GMail is currently available by invitation only.) It sounds like a good idea to me.

My friend Steve pointed me at this website, Furl today. Pretty cool concept. I added a section on my webpage that lists the latest items I have marked.