Art History without Art, a 10 Year Old, Learning to Program, and Book Reviews

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Why you shouldn’t invest in the diamond market, trigonometric games, controlling servos from smartphones, and more.

Steve Gibson's JavaScript Ultra-High Entropy Pseduo-Random Number Generator

“What’s so special about this pseudo-random number generator?
This carefully designed PRNG utilizes more than 1536 bits of internal “state” memory. The operating parameters of the generator’s algorithm were carefully chosen (it uses a “safe prime” factor) to guarantee that every possible PRNG “state” is visited before the sequence begins to repeat. The result is that the “period” of this generator will be the “Germain prime” 1,768,863 × 21535 – 1, which is approximately 2.132 × 10468. This is such a large number that it might as well be infinite. This generator effectively never repeats.”

TobyGames - Minecraft - First Four Days

Wyatt loves watching Tobuscus and his videos – this is his first video online.

Minecraft - Flying Mount

One of Tobuscus more popular videos.

Khan Academy

Learn to program for free – and with much fun.

Deploying Rails: Automate, Deploy, Scale, Maintain, and Sleep at Night

I am currently reading and enjoying this book. It is helping ease my Rails app deployment. Really well organized and I finally feel good about my hosting of the apps I make.

Today’s modern Rails applications have lots of moving parts. Make sure your next production deployment goes smoothly with this hands-on book, which guides you through the entire production process. You’ll set up scripts to install and configure all the software your servers need, including your application code. Once you’re in production, you’ll learn how to set up systems to monitor your application’s health, gather metrics so you can stop problems before they start, and fix things when they go wrong.

Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share - gids can learn to code and create

This MIT progject allows anyone to start playing with programing, and.

it’s a lot of fun. -Wyatt

Super Scratch Programming Adventure! - Book

Wyatt is currently reading this book and learning to program games.

Learn to program by making cool games!

New Philippine law outlaws cybersex

“In a new legislation recently signed into law by the country’s president, the Philippines has outlawed cybersex and online sex video chat (you might know them as ‘cam girls’) as part of a comprehensive new anti-cybercrime and libel law.”

An art history book, minus the art

“According to a blog post published by a disgruntled parent of a student, the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) is forcing students to buy an art history book for $180 — which wouldn’t be unheard of, but the catch is that the publishers of this book didn’t get any of the image rights for the artwork it includes. To reiterate, that’s an art history survey without any pictures.”

W3C Announces Web-Based Crypto API

“This specification describes a JavaScript API for performing basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes an API for applications to generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform these operations. Key storage is provided for both temporary and permanent keys. Access to keying material is contingent on the same origin policy. Uses for this API range from user or service authentication, document or code signing, and the confidentiality and integrity of communications.”

Russia reveals shiny state secret: It's awash in diamonds

“‘Trillions of carats’ lie below a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile-diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem. The Russians have known about the site since the 1970s.”

World's Largest Web Comic

165,888×79,872 pixels