-”Can he lead a normal life?”
-”No. He’ll be an engineer.”
5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do
I’ve watched an interesting talk at TED by Gever Tulley. I recommend to especially those who have kid(s) or plan to have.
Cryptography Classes for .NET Compact Framework
You may know that System.Security.Cryptography for Compact Framework lacks many cryptography algorithms compared to the desktop .Net Framework (2005 and later). In a project we have needed SHA512 encryption on Windows CE and we have found /cfAes library which provides almost all of the crypto functionality of .NET Framework. We are grateful to the author for sharing the class library.
The following table displays a comparison between the versions of .Net Framework with respect to the support for different crypyography algorithms (X means that it is supported, 0 means partially supported).
| Crytpo Algorithm | .NET 2003 | OpenNETCF 1.2 | /cfAES | WSE 2.0 | CF 2.0 | .NET 2005 |
| MD5 | X | X | X | X | X | |
| SHA1 | X | X | X | X | X | |
| SHA256 | X | X | X | |||
| SHA384 | X | X | X | |||
| SHA512 | X | X | X | |||
| MACTripleDES | X | 0 | X | X | ||
| HMACSHA1 | X | X | X | X | X | |
| PasswordDeriveBytes | X | 0 | X | X | ||
| RC2 | X | X | X | X | X | |
| DES | X | X | X | X | X | |
| TripleDES | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Rijndeal | X | X | X | X | ||
| RSA | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| DSA | X | X | X | X | X | |
| RIPEMD160 | X | X | ||||
| HMACMD5 | X | X | ||||
| HMACSHA256 | X | X | ||||
| HMACSHA384 | X | X | ||||
| HMACSHA512 | X | X | ||||
| HMACRIPEMD160 | X | X | ||||
| Rfc2898DeriveBytes | X | X | ||||
| ProtectedData | X | X | ||||
| ProtectedMemory | X | X | ||||
| PSHA1 | X | X | ||||
| AESKeyExchangeFormatter | X | X | ||||
| TripleDesKeyExchangeFormatter | X | X | ||||
| SecureString | X | X |
Storage Cost over Years
Every time I buy a new PC, either desktop or notebook, its hard disk capacity is larger than the previous one even though the total price of the PC is about equal. The same thing may apply for the other components of the PC like main memory capacity and CPU power, but hard disk capacity is something very different.
Matthew Komorowski has collected hard drive capacity/price data and created the graph below:
Source: http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte
Komorowski has also drawn a conclusion about the capacity/cost trend as:
Over the last 30 years, space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months (increasing by an order of magnitude every 48 months)
Moreover, he has a formula for the cost as
Below are two pictures from computer magazines of 80s. Incredible!
Quote of the Day from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Here comes the quote of the day from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince):
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I like this saying because it emphasizes that simple and effective approaches should be sought to design and build anything (eg. software producsts in my profession) elegant.
