Sorry, (e:strip) ((e:terry) too), I've been working too much ((e:Paul) too)

For the last couple months I've been awaiting this new tool called "Let's Encrypt" to come out. Basically it allows you to generate valid SSL certs for free, that are trusted by must make browsers. it's backed by Mozilla. You run their open source client (or implement your own based on the spec) which exchanges keys, serves up a file with a nonce, and validates your domain. Some big certificate authority is going to cross validate their certs, and its public starting in November.

I can't wait to use it and not have to worry about paying for a cert.
It doesn't offer extended validation or insurance or anything, but its still very awesome. Too bad the NSA (and others) are still probably listening in already ;)

Now that Halloween has become a month long event, there is a party almost every weekend. This weekend was one at Mickey and (e:robert)'s.

Before we headed over there, I met up with Emily, Mike, Annie and Julie etc at Hardware. Normally I hate it there but we got there before it was a toolfest and had plenty space to dance. Emily got real crunk, hbd gurl.







I met up with (e:paul) and (e:terry) at the Halloween party a little after midnight. The party was disorientingly crazy fun. Mickey and Nick's princess peach costumes were ridiculous.

Tom and (e:paul)

Checking out Tom's fur

We all were drawn to one tiny room, not unlike our parties.

Some how fall snuck up on us, and it went from warm to freezing in the course of a day. I'm wearing shorts because you need to adjust to the weather, otherwise you'll never survive the winter.


We went to the Clinton Bailey farmer's market and got three medium sized pumpkins, instead of one huge one. Whoop for convenience. It's really crazy how many pumpkins are grown that are just used for decoration, and then tossed. I wonder how it compares to the biomass of Christmas trees that are grown every year. At least you can eat the pumpkins.

We spent Saturday doing some fall cleaning on the house, moving plants inside, and preparing the furnace. Here's (e:paul) spinnin' the vacuum hose like a helicopter.



At night it actually snowed. Just a little bit, but still. It's still nothing to the 6 inches they got in the southern tier.

I was hungry and didn't eat lunch today, so I decided to make something with the giant farmers market zuchinni we had.

I had some fritters, we finished them all immediately.

The recipie called for:
4 cups of shredded zuchinni
2/3 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/3 cup scallions

Shred the zuchinni, then squeeze the water of out it until you can't any more. Mix everything together, add shredded cheese and onion if you want, and pan fry until brown.

The squeezed zucchini water was so green. I drank it, because, you know, vitamins.

I ran into this video on reddit of the sounds of different sorting algorithms make as they process random data. It's pretty mesmerizing to watch.


Some actually sound pretty cool. My favorite one is the bogo sort, even though it's basically impossible to actually sort data with it (bogo sort is randomly shuffling data and hoping it's suddenly sorted).

It's cool to see the processed visualized like this. Something makes me think I would have like data structures much better in school if we got to do things like this, considering no one ever needs to implement any sorting themselves.



This video is a much better comparison of different sorts. You can't hear the sounds they make, but you can see the differences in memory usage vs compute time (faster sorts take less time, while the more memory efficient algorithms have less colored elements selected at a time) They start with different arrangements of starting data.

On a different note, I found out today you can get a real computer science masters online for only $7,000 from Georgia Institute of Technology . After PEF reimbursements it would be almost $0 for me. You can also take the same classes for no credit for free. I am never giving a school money, but if you need a piece of paper kind of cool. Most subjects could be self taught and practiced/reviweed with Reddit and StackExchange, but having all a subject's info in one place and getting standard feedback on your projects is also useful.