Cool Stuff

I like some things. Therefore, I compiled a list of things I really like. This doubles as a project page (see Things I made).

Things other people made (in no particular order)

Fediverse: It’s a pretty cool place where pretty cool people hang out.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC): It’s a pretty cool place where pretty cool people hang out, but you can actually write a client within reasonable time.
ChaCha20: A straightforward stream cipher. Unless you have unusual power analysis threat model or an actively hostile CPU, a naïve implementation is generally a correct one and I think that’s profoundly beautiful. Incidentally, the original design with 64-bit counter and 64-bit nonce was the right one and IETF ChaCha20 with 96-bit counter and 32-bit nonce fundamentally misunderstands the point, albeit I admit their hand was forced by how TLS was designed.
Decaf and Ristretto: A beautifully elegant hack to remove cofactor issues with twisted Edwards curves. Read more about it in Mike Hamburg’s paper introducing Decaf, the Ristretto group website and the CFRG draft for an IETF RFC.
ISO/IEC 9899:1999: The best C to ever C.
A general check digit system based on finite groups: In 2014/2015, Yanling Chen, Markku Niemenmaa and A. J. Han Vinck released a paper constructing a check digit system that mathematically rules out most human entry errors.
OpenBSD: Feels like a modern ’90s *NIX. It’s pretty comfy. However, I’m not taking a position on their security claims.
Practical Typography: An online book published by Matthew Butterick, teaching you the basics of typography (which, as it turns out, is more than enough to make your stuff look light years better than whatever the unwashed masses put out). You can read through it in an afternoon. Read Practical Typography today.
Machikado Mazoku: The most adorable cute girls doing cute things show.
Stella Glow: The most underrated TRPG gem on the 3DS. The story may not be anything out of the ordinary, neither is the gameplay, but the execution is stellar.
Trails in the Sky: The best trilogy in Falcom’s Trails series.

Things I made

asdffdsa.rb: A convenient way for me to herd my virtual machine networking. A more reasonable person wouldn’t rely on invoking qemu directly, but I happen to be an unreasonable person. Download current version (license: Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0).
Maximally Permissive Software Licensing: A look at some unloved licenses: An essay that investigates the current options for making software available under maximally permissive terms.
On Æsthetic Digital Rights Management (DRM): An essay that investigates what I consider to be æsthetic digital rights management and how, from a certain perspective, DRM can be justified sometimes.
Friend Codes in the Context of Social Networks: An essay that takes a closer look at how friend codes could have solved Discord's username issue. No concrete scheme is presented, which follows in a succcessor article.
Friend Codes in the Context of Social Networks: A Concrete Scheme: An essay that makes a concrete instantiation of the ideas presented in the previous article.
Linear congruential Generator (LCG) Parameters of Good Quality: In 1999, Pierre L’Ecuyer presented a paper entitled “Tables of Linear Congruential Generators of Different Sizes and Good Lattice Structure” that was published in volume 68(225) of Mathematics of Computation, pp. 249–260. However, there have been significant errata affecting the most useful part, the tables of good MCG and LCG parameters. Neither are PDFs particularly accessible nor are errata obvious to find, so I summarized the parts relevant for those who just want a working MCG or LCG.
Colorizing Strings: In my previous post Friend Codes in the Context of Social Networks: A Concrete Scheme, I proposed a scheme for friend codes as primary user identifiers on social networks. Part thereof was a suggestion of coloring the friend codes as a way of obvious typo identification. This post explores, after having implemented such a thing, various alternatives and collects ideas for useful implementation.
Planning your SCO XENIX System V Ver. 2.3 disk layout: An interactive disk planner based on a worksheet in some ancient operating system’s manual. In other words: A solution in search of a problem.
An Atom Feed for My Posts: Remember syndication and RSS and Atom? As it turns out, there are people who still use it. So now my posts have an Atom feed.
rkeysd: Somewhat æsthetic license keys for Java using export-strength cryptography. Release probably never due to namespace hangups.