OddThinking

A blog for odd things and odd thoughts.

ROT13 Sentences Challenge

The challenge: What sentence becomes another valid sentence when ROT13ed?

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Security Notice: Chasey It Selection Protocol

To decide who is “it” (or “in”) first, in a playground game, such as chasey (a.k.a. tag), a fixed algorithmic process is used to make a pseudo-random choice.

Of course, this is a deterministic procedure, and we can, with diligence, careful calculation, computational power and just a little bit of luck, reverse engineer the algorithm and determine who will be eventually selected.

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Doing What You Can

A random memory from when I was a kid on holidays in Murray Bridge just occurred to me. I was listening to a local radio station that was running a promotion with a baby food manufacturer. They called their listeners at random, and if they could read off the serial number from a can of […]

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Happy-New-Year protocol DOS vulnerability

Wishing someone a Happy New Year may subject you to a Denial-of-Service Attack

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On Dignity

I have been listening to organisations demanding that we defend our human right to die with dignity.

I find myself unable to support them.

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Characters with character

Some Unicode characters are just calling for a caption competition. Ṏ “Latin capital letter o with tilde and diaeresis”? Is that the best you can do, Unicode Consortium?

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Numeracy

I was just reminiscing about when I enrolled in Biology 1 at uni. They wanted to get a feel for the mathematical literacy of their students, so they gave us all a quick numeracy test, to see if we understood some basic concepts.

There were only four questions, clearly labelled Question 1, Question 2, Question 4 and Question 4.

I think I met the required standard…

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SoIP QoS

One day I was thinking about the tradition of April Fools’ Day RFC Submissions and thought it would be fun to do a similar parody, but based on the Patent Submission form.

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He Would Have Gotten Away With It, If It Wasn’t For That Damn Kid!

He was soon being groomed for the highest public office in the land… There was however, a fly in the ointment.

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Charmap of the Future

{To Do: Create a pithy excerpt that makes this article about foreign characters compelling to read.}

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