One relatively standard way to identify someone is to generate a small token which you can give to them, and which they can later give back to you. This is a classic “user cookie” scenario. The ID could be any data which is unique, but it should also be hard fake - you shouldn’t be able to guess one from scratch, nor to change an existing ID slightly to get someone else’s ID. One standard way to do this is to encrypt a sequential user ID. While almost all languages offer some form of encryption, it can be tricky to get encryption working between platforms. To find ou

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I hope to start posting again, and was planning on writing something serious, but then I saw this, and it struck a chord.

Whenever it happens to us, as it often does, it helps us relate to the Joe Garvins of the world.

So you’ve just been handed a big plate of spaghetti code to take care of, and you’re feeling overwhelmed. Michael C. Kasten has some great advice on how to deal with this skillfully. It’s short and to the point, so I won’t repeat it. But it’s definitely worth reading.

I was a generally good student, but I always had problems spelling. While I did eventually learn to spell (mostly), my hard work didn’t always pay off because I was sloppy while proofreading. I’m very grateful to the teachers who never let me get away with it - they had a herculean task. But I’m afraid today I let them down - I misspelled Scott Rosenberg’s name in a trackback to his blog. Doh! So Scott, please accept my apologies. And Mrs. Smith, Mr. Spencer, Mr. Lancaster, Mr. Montgomery, Dr. Chapman, Mrs. Atterman, and of course Mrs. Scobbie, I don’t suppose I could convince you to look the other way just this once, please.

And even though at this moment I have a log in my eye , I will say that I think it’s very important for and all IT professionals to not just spell correctly, but to become proficient proofreaders.

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0. Preamble

Let us go then, you and I,
When the code is spread against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Code Read #11 from Scott Rosenberg deals with James Noble’s and Robert Biddle’s “Notes on Postmodern Programming”.

1. A Sentimentalist’s Apology

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats,
Of all-night coding, of cheap cube walls,
Of pizza boxes in the halls:

I have a confession to make: I love arithmetic. Not the addition and multiplication of engineering, but the study of numbers themselves. From Euclid’s Algorithm to RSA Encryption, no other subject mixes such simplicity and such depth. Even more beautifully, there is still so much unknown. For example, from Richard Guy’s book “Unsolved Problems in Number Theory“: Is every even number greater than 4 the sum of two primes? Are there infinitely many primes which are one more than a square? Is there an odd number that is the sum of its own divisors? Nobody knows.

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