Actually, I realized that if I stick to my original intent of Tuesday/Thursday, then I really WON’T be back on the 6th.
So, yeah, the 7th. Tuesday. Should be the seventh anyway.
Archive for the ‘Site Maintenance’ Category
OK, so obviously it’s been offline for over a month now. I’m just making it official.
I’ll be back online in April 6.
When we went to India, I had intended to take my logbook and the DES algorithm and work through it (again), methodically and structured this time. You know, at the top of each page I put the numbers from the last iteration for start, then work the iteration in the same places, so I can always see which piece is where because it’s not changing.
But then I left the docs on the kitchen counter where they were from taking the pics. And I simply do NOT remember the DES algorithm off the top of my head. Are you nuts? So that didn’t get done.
Because I know the DES work would get tedious, I had also picked out ~10 of the Project Euler problems that I could work out on paper, maybe type in a code when we got back to test it and get the final result or something. But then the printer choked hard and wouldn’t print anything. So I didn’t take those.
Part of the intention of those had been to get some content that I could post easily during the recoup time between India and Thanksgiving. So nothing got posted in November because all of that content didn’t get done. But now Thanksgiving is over, and we’re not (AFAIK) going anywhere until next summer for holiday … so here’s hoping I can get back to posting at least twice a week here.
Going to try sticking to the TTh schedule, it’s a good twice a week set.
So, I’m thinking of doing some more of the Project Euler stuff. Not sure how precisely to handle them, since for the most part they’re algorithmic rather than “solve the equation” things …
But it’s a thought for getting more bits. Because as proven by the DES example that I’ve been working on FOREVER, doing the demonstrations for cryptography by hand is slow 
Oops. I thought I had a post queued up for Tuesday, and then everything else in the way I didn’t get a chance to look until now.
I’m going to try to get up a post later today for today’s post. This is just to acknowledge that i botched Tuesday’s :/
I was working on my other blog a little while ago.
First off, Kiir noticed the avatars on someone else’s blog and realized that ours supports them by default. so she wanted an avatar. She went and set up her account, getting it all set up nicely with a nice pic, rebuilding it a few times as she figured out the (apparently undocumented) size she could use. Apparently it can take an 80×80 (gravatar this is) and it auto-resizes whenever someone requests a different size. More to the point, it takes the smaller image, resizes it UP to 80×80, and then can resize down. So her 50×50 didn’t turn out so well. Actually, I think 80×80 is what I told her from something I read after she did 50×50. I think she said it was noticeably larger still. So yeah.
Then she went to look at the blog. and her avatar wasn’t showing. So she was fiddling with her gravatar account and her commenters account. And there I am trying to get it working for her. I’m looking at the IMG SRC (which, it turns out, auto-rebuilds to the ACTUAL src, which was the fallback default, rather than the full URL, so that confused me for a bit). Then I’m digging through the code for the template, maybe guy broke it somewhere (yeah, because, you know, I’m the first person to ever try using gravatars on that theme). digging, looking, debugging, wtfing. Find the full URL. Falls back to the default. Try it piecemeal, and it worked all the way to the end. Seriously, it took me 10 minutes and I eventually fell back to using vi and diff to fin the difference between the working URL that I put together and the broken one that it was using.
Near as I can tell? One of them had ;r=G and the other had &r=G. There was also a difference in image sizes, technically. I don’t know which of them was the broken part. I’m guessing the & vs ;. But it works for the other persons avatar, so thats obviously not it either.
So then I’m looking at the admin options, because maybe this is some kind of cached response thing … or something. I finally turned off the default avatar, figuring maybe that’d flush whatever it was. And suddenly it worked! So I turned it back on, and it didn’t work anymore.
So, now, my other blog doesn’t have a default avatar. Not sure about this one yet. It doesn’t have any comments, so I’m not real concerned.
Argh. Grr. Seriously, I WILL get back to this page eventually. I’m still thinking that maybe DES wasn’t the best first choice, though :/
I had intended to get the next post in the DES Demonstrated series prepped and posted to show on Thursday, but had a few too many loose ends to wrap up at work before our vacation.
After the next post, I’ve got “repeat 16 times”, so those posts will probably go up one a day, which will still take 2-3 weeks since they are some LONG steps.
So, I decided to go ahead and restart the cryptoblogging site, but I gave it anew name, a new (real) url, and broadened it up a bit. Hopefully I’ll do a better job of keeping it moving this time.
Anyway, this is to get a first post up so the site doesn’t look broken 