Stavros' Stuff

On programming and other things.

Petals Around the Rose

I stumbled upon a game today, it’s called Petals Around the Rose. It’s played with 5 dice, and you can only be told these three things about the game:

  1. The name of the game is significant.
  2. The number of petals comes from the dice, there’s only one answer for each roll and it’s either 0 or an even number.
  3. You can be told the number of petals after each roll.

Your goal is to figure

Continue reading…

Authentication

Some time ago I thought of an authentication scheme for website registration (or anything else) using asymmetric encryption, which went something like this (Alice is the user, Bob is the server):

  1. Alice signs up for an account and gives her public key to Bob.
  2. Bob stores it.
  3. When Alice wants to log on to Bob’s site, Bob sends her a random number of sufficient length, Alice signs it,

Continue reading…

Hard disk crash

OK, it’s like this: Originally I had one 80 GB disk, one 120 GB disk and a 160 GB one that stopped working three months after I bought it (damn Maxtor). Last week I got a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda so I’d finally have some space (all the other disks were full).

The new disk arrived, I ghosted the 80 one on the 250 (after quite a few crashes and hangs, which after a while stopped), and I installed t

Continue reading…

Moviepig

A few days ago I stumbled upon this great website called Moviepig. In short, it will tell you if you’re going to like a movie or not. You tell it a list of movies you have seen in order of preference (most liked to least liked) and then you ask it how much you’re going to like a movie you haven’t seen. It uses collaborative filtering to search for other people with the s

Continue reading…

Done

All done, hopefully everything works. If you notice that something is amiss, please email me using the link on the top right or leave a comment in the page (you probably need to create an account to do that). Thanks.

Continue reading…