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-MMORPG quote: "Doomkitten"-

Last night, I had the strange experience of dreaming that I had a pillow. Yes, a pillow. Before you get too confused, I do have a pillow, but I happened to throw the pillowcase into the laundry hamper, figuring that I could live without having the pillow on my bed for a night or two. Looking back, this may not be the case.

I'm not sure I quite understand why dandelions are considered weeds. Sure, if you're actually trying to grow a smooth, perfect lawn and a few of them pop up, they look ugly -- much the same way that hair does when it's halfway between wet and dry. Then, of course, you get frustrated because, to restore the perfectness of the lawn, you have to root them up, which is a Sisyphean task if ever there was one.

But if you ever get a chance, find an abandoned lot where the dandelions have taken over, and there's enormous fluffy swaths of the soft clocks and bright flowers, punctuated every now and again with delicate, low-growing pink flowers (also "weeds"). The result somehow looks completely different from when dandelions first invade a lawn. It looks like a faery meadow, ready to be set to magnificent seed-swirling at any breeze.

As you may have guessed, I have a dandelion meadow near my home. Whenever I walk past it, on my way home or on my way out, I am so thankful that no one has put forth a serious effort to remove it.

Reality check. Also, dandelions have many edible parts, or so I'm told.

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-Old song quote: "Ah poor bird! Take thy flight / high above the sorrows of this sad night."-

My dreams this week (or one of them at least) have me wondering what in the world "Abilene" is. It's rare for me to remember a word from a dream, particularly since this one came with a precise spelling as well.

The week has been busy and not all that fruitful. I'm currently learning to use a typesetting program/language called LaTeX, which may or may not be useful later down my current career path.

Let's just say that the program is ornery. The thing is designed to make formatting one of the lesser concerns of writers (particularly technical writers -- it contains plenty of packages for beautifully typesetting equations), but at the level of mastery I have so far, the formatting is just annoying. You see, the way that it keeps the user from worrying about formatting is by deciding that it always knows best in that department. It can be surprisingly difficult to get it to do what you want it to do if your idea of proper formatting doesn't match TeX's ideas.

Add to this my fair level of proficiency in Microsoft Word, which makes learning any new formatting program just a little more frustrating. Often I'll decide that I want to do X to the document and not think much of it, but it'll turn out to be a lot harder in TeX than I'm used to having it be in Word. I sound like such a Windows fanboy, but I would guess that this happens to anyone who becomes a "power user" in any one application (no matter whether that application is even good or not).

On the other hand, LaTeX does make certain things much, MUCH, easier, particularly in mathematics-heavy writing. It sure is easier to just type $\leq$ than to have to hunt down that ≤ symbol on the character map. So it would behoove me to learn to play well with its flaws -- I'm pretty sure that the benefits, at least for me, will end up being much greater.

Reality check. Wait... a city in Texas?? Why would that occur to me?

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-BOL quote: "...and Blogger..."-

No particularly interesting dreams this week -- it strikes me once again that dreams generally deal with very ordinary situations, but with limited ability for your brain to manipulate them in order to see what would happen if x or y happened and you reacted in z way.

I'm surprised that, as the years go by, less and less people seem interested in cryptography. In world war eras, sure, there was that sort of umbrella fascination with spies, which included cryptography, but now crypto is mostly associated with day-to-day data encryption. While this is an extremely important field, it's also a lot less awesome than spies, I must admit.

What makes crypto unique, in my opinion, is that it is one of the few "practical" jobs in which theoretical mathematicians can participate. Both the public and private sectors are always looking for new encryption schemes that are more difficult to crack, and this process actually requires mathematical research, if you can wrap your mind around that phrase.

Many of the encryption schemes deal with prime numbers, a concept which is still surprisingly mysterious to modern mathematics. Prime numbers have the advantage that, since they are not divisible by other numbers, there won't be duplicate "keys" that unlock the same encrypted message. For example, if each digit in a passcode multiplied the numbers in the encrypted message (which wouldn't be particularly secure, but as an example), you would have to guard against situations in which you could use either "41" or "22" to unlock the same message. Naturally, you'd want only the one correct key to unlock it to make it harder for someone to hit a working key by accident. If the numbers were restricted to primes, then neither 4 nor 1 would be allowed, and only 22 could unlock the message.

Another important area for cryptos to keep track of is letter usage frequency. If a person is looking at a poorly encrypted document and sees 12 times as many $'s on it as anything else, he could guess straight away that "$" means "e". The way around this problem is to give frequently-used letters multiple representations, while keeping the representations of rarely-used letters proportionately low. If "e" is now represented by "$", "&" and "*", it's harder for a person ignorant of their meanings to notice the huge streaks of the letter in the document, but decoding the document is essentially just as easy as before for people who do know the relationships.

Reality check. For some more rigorous cryptomania fodder: http://www.mycrypto.net/encryption/crypto_algorithms.html

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-Booth list quote: "ECHOSTAR Edward Jones Edward Kraemer & Sons, Inc."-

Most interesting dream this week: the one in which I was blind. Except for, my brain was silly and decided that seeing nothing would be too boring, so it switched me to third person instead.

As it turns out, I like walking. I didn't realize this until I decided, on the fly, to forgo the whole "car" hassle and just walk to my house. At this point, I was about 40 minutes away from said house.

I've never been a very athletic person, much more bookish. I didn't see the point of being outside in the elements more than I had to, so I didn't do much of the kid-like activities when I was little -- as a result, I never developed much in the way of endurance or strength. Or gracefulness.

Fast forward to adulthood, and my move from sea level to mile-high Colorado. At first, that only increased my desire to avoid exertion because I was always lagging behind everyone else, huffing and puffing. But, as anyone who has been to Colorado would know, the natives just LOVE the outdoors and any activities that give them an excuse to go there.

This is what people mean when they talk about "good" peer pressure.

Reality check. Of course, now when my relatives visit from The Great Domesticated Desert of Doom^TM, I have to remember to slow down for them.

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-Chrome quote: "Help me understand"-

Dreams about sitting on benches and awkward conversations this week.

I'm relatively busy at the moment, so today's post will be brief but (hopefully) meaty.

Freeware Tools/Games Worth Getting

Vuplayer and Meow MultiSound are quite handy for those of us that like to grab music from the hidden files of games (which is fair use in my book) -- generally the music is in some strange format that Windows Media Player frowns at in consternation. Vuplayer is also just an all-around well-designed music player, and it plays and exports a zillion formats.

Knytt and Within a Deep Forest are games made by that genius, Nifflas. Wonderful pixel art, music, and pleasantly frustrating gameplay. You really have to try them to understand... and anyway, they're both free, although WaDF can occasionally trip false alarms with overeager antivirus programs, so be aware.

Finally, for those of us still a bit sore about the whole "Vista" shenanigan comes a program actually made to work with Vista -- and the title even proclaims it! LogonStudio Vista can be used to replace that swoopy blue-green stuff that comes default on the logon screen with something a bit more personal. The program, as I understand it, is a fairly simple "hack" of sorts, but it's still a pretty neat little feature, especially when others see your logon screen and wonder how you did it.

Reality check. I've been running all of these on my computer for some time now, so I can vouch for their lack of infection; you always have to be careful with freeware because often there's a reason it's free.