Life As It Comes 
Intro to ECCNo Comments
My good friends at Certicom have published an Introduction to Elliptic Curve Cryptography. This is what I worked on for Schlumberger while I interned there. ECC is now used in many cellular telephones by the smart card chip inside.
In other news, Kirsten Dunst is single!
Challenging PassportNo Comments
It’s good to see that more companies are signing up to challenge Passport.
See: Liberty Alliance.
Half Dome in the NewsNo Comments
Here’s an article about Half Dome that was in the news today. I climbed it Summer 2002 during ExtremeBlue - all except that last 900 feet with the cables. My final elevation was somewhere in the 7,000s feet. It was a 7.5 mile hike to get there and a 7.5 mile hike back down. You can see pictures here.
You Feeling Strong, Fuerte?No Comments
I watched Gary Hall swim to victory in the 50 m freestyle on Sunday, and I just have to say I’m getting USA Olympic Swimming Team fever.
Airport ExpressNo Comments
I am the proud owner of an Airport Express. I bought a new receiver today too (a Panasonic SA-XR50S), which seemed to automagically detect that my speakers were of a lower wattage, because when I first turned on the receiver, it kept saying that it was overloading the speakers, so I turned it off, and when it came back on, it had adjusted the output to my speakers! Pretty sweet!
But anyway, back to the Airport Express. It is so choice! I was having some issues with the Airport Wireless card in my new Powerbook not playing nicely with my Linksys router and basically getting really slow speeds, but since the A.E. plugs in to a CAT-5 and spews Apple-friendly wireless out, problem solved. (Before I got the A.E., I had to tune down the TX rates on my router to 1-2 MBps to get the speed up - see this article.) But I thought for those of you that were curious, I would post some handy items here:
1 When you configure, you have to configure with the A.E. in DHCP mode, but you can change it to have a static IP later.
2 I had VNC pointing to my Powerbook, so I wanted to get the port forwarding working. I fired up the Airport Admin Utility and forwarded 5900 and 139 (Windows File Sharing) to my Powerbook.
And now I’m listening to some Howie over my stereo playing from ye olde Powerbook. Plus if I get really lazy, I can VNC into my Powerbook and change the song and it’ll beam across to the stereo! Oh man. The marvels of technology!
