It’s been a bit of a day for nostalgia. It started even before I woke up, when I was dreaming about an argument that could have marked the end of Claire and I’s relationship, if it weren’t for the fact that it didn’t even slighly represent the actual
circumstances of our seperation (I’ll spare you all the details). I was woken by a phone call from a company with whom I used to deal. Later, I caught up with an old friend via instant
messanger, in what was probably my only delibrate act of nostalgia of the day. Finally, while working this evening on a techy project that’s been part of my life for about the last
eight years, the random number generator in my MP3 playing software decided all of its own accord that what I’d really like to listen to is the same music I was listening to when I
first started on the project.
Did I not get the memo that this is National Nostalgia Day, or something? Is everything conspiring around me, or is this all a coincidence?
The thing I’ve learned about nostalgia is that it’s generally best left as it is: a collection of figments in your mind. Some are accurate, some mis-remembered, and all are seen through
glasses tinted with the colour of hindsight. And that’s great: that’s exactly how your brain is supposed to experience times past. If you’re an optimist, like me, it’s easy to pick out
your favourite memories and pretend that your life gone by was all as great as your happiest moments. If you’re a pessimist, well: you probably do the same thing, but compare those
great memories to how awful things are right now (and you’re wrong, but I can’t just tell you that and give you a more rational worldview, just as your cynicism won’t “fix” me, either).
That’s inevitable, of course: think back to the moment in your life at which you felt the most content that you ever have – at least that comes right to your mind. Unless your time on
the planet has been a continuous curve of improvement, with no ups-and-downs, then there’s something remarkable about that moment: it’s not right now. Well duh, of
course it isn’t. The most elementary mathematics would indicate that of all of the experiences in your life, there has to be some kind of regression toward the mean going on: what
you’re experiencing now should, on average, be representative of your life so far even before you factor in the Von Restoroff effect and other cognitive biases.
But I digress. My point was this: I would love to be able to finish what I’m working on and go play a game of Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle with folks like Bryn and Kit and Liz and Strokey Adam, just like I did over six and a half years ago. But
that’s not my life nowadays. And while I can get all doe-eyed about how awesome the Ship & Castle used to be before they gutted it and made it look like a trendy wine bar (apologies to
those of you for whom this is the news being broken of its demise), or I can pine for the days that those friends – now long-gone – used to all live a stone’s throw away from me, but
that’s not the full story. I don’t miss being even poorer than I am now, I don’t miss having to juggle my academic life with holding down a job, and a certainly don’t miss being quite
so arrogant as I was back then (for those of you who’ve only recently met me; think of me now, only more so).
Nostalgia is like alcohol: it’s great in moderation, but if you get too much of it, or you become dependent upon it, then you’re liable to get stuck and not be able to move on. And I
think that’s the message I should be taking away from this morning’s dream.
(and now, in a somewhat ironic and roundabout way, I’d better stop writing so I can go and play board games with the current Aber crew, as part of a tradition that
started with Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle, all those years ago…)
Right now, I’m out in Oxfordshire for this a “code week” – a get-together for the purpose of hacking some code together – for the Three Rings project. That’s got nothing to do with this post, but helps to offer a framing device by which I can explain why I was in
such proximity to London in the first place.
JTA at the Ops Room table
Last night, y’see, Ruth and I hopped on the bus down to London to meet up with Robin, her brother, for his
21st birthday. Starting out at The Dove in Broadway Market, we began an adventure of epic proportions, backed up by some
of the least-consistent planning ever encountered in a pub crawl. At times, the revellers and I were as one unit, moving together through the capital, shouting “Dave!” in unison. Other
times, keeping the group together and headed in the same direction was a little like trying to herd cats.
But progress was made, and a milestone birthday was celebrated. Highlights included:
Pub Jenga
Pub Monopoly is so last week: Pub Jenga is the new hotness. At each bar, we brought out a set of Jenga, the bricks of which had each been emblazoned – using a marker pen – with
the names of diferent areas of London. When the tower collapsed, the brick responsible dictated where we would go to next.
Pub Jenga – The Next Big Thing
The person responsible for the destruction of the tower was required to drink a penalty shot of Jägermeister and be the bearer of the Jenga set and The Trowel until the next pub. Oh yeah, The Trowel. Robin’s plan was that, at the end of
the night, the Jenga set would be buried forever at a secret location. As we’d left before this point to catch the bus back to Oxford, I’ve no idea whether or not this actually
happened.
Another gripping turn of Pub Jenga
Mystery Pockets
Ruth and Robin’s older brother, Owen, had come prepared: having numbered each of his eight pockets and placed a mystery item in each, Robin was periodically charged with picking a
number, at which point the contents of the pocket were revealed and used. Some of the items revealed were:
Face Paints
One of the first Mystery Pockets contained red and green face paints, with inevitable results. Also, I’m not sure what was in them, but quite a lot of people at the table started
itching quite a lot after they were applied: whoops! Click the thumbnails for bigger pictures.
Party Poppers
After these were chosen, everybody managed to get ahead of Robin by sprinting down a tube station fire escape staircase, and hiding around the corner at the bottom. Which might have
been more effective if not for the fact that it’s quite hard to hide a dozen people in a tight stairwell. Also, that Robin had decided by this point to “fall” down the staircase.
Silly String!
Silly string! It’s so silly!
It’s silly. ‘Nuff said.
People Of London
Our travels put us into contact with a variety of people from around the city, like:
The Moon Man
In Covent Garden, we got a small audience as a result of our various exploits, but this one – persuading a random stranger to bare his colourful underwear to the world, might be the
best. In the background, you can just make out an unrelated group of partygoers, about to tie themselves together with a long rope left lying around by a street performer.
The Moon Man pulls his trousers down
Owen’s Fans
The two women at the next table from us in a bar in Oxford Circus, who seemed quite pleased and impressed when Owen tore his shirt in half in a show of manliness. I’m pretty sure that
if he’d have asked, they’d have paid to see more.
Jamaican Me Crazy
A busker with drums who we persuaded to play the most reggae interpretation of Happy Birthday To You that has ever been heard.
Lay down some beats! Dancing might have been involved on my part.
Dave!!!
I can’t even remember how, but it quickly became our callsign that – in order to make sure that everybody was together (at least, after we’d lost the enormous Papa-Smurf-penis-styled
balloon, fresh from Owen’s mystery pockets, that had previouly been our beacon), we’d all shout “Dave!!!”, as if we’d lost somebody by that name. No, I can’t explain it either.
But… where’s Dave? DAVE? DAVE!!!
A Cornish-Pasty Themed Pub
Seriously, such a thing exists. We almost gave this one a missing, mistaking it for merely being a late-night Cornish Pasty Shop (yes, that was more believable to us at this point),
before we noticed that it had a bouncer. “What kind of bakery needs security?” “Ohhhhh.”
I’m still amazed that we didn’t attract a larger audience than we did, playing Jenga in this famous spot for street entertainers.
Racing Around The Transport Network
You know all of those signs about not playing on the escalators, not running up the escalators: all that jazz. Apparently some of the group didn’t think that they applied to them, with
hilarious consequences. Honestly, I’ve never seen somebody slide all the way down the central reservation of a 100-foot escaltor before, “bouncing” over every sign and
emergency-stop-button as they rocketed down along the polished steel. And if I never do again, that’ll be fine, because I’ve seen it now.
Meeting Some Fabulous People
Turns out, everybody who came along to Robin’s birthday – most of whom I hadn’t previously met – were all awesome in their own unique ways. It’s been a long time since I’ve hung out in
the company of such a lively crowd. Thanks to you all for a fantastic night out.
Much thanks to Welsh Water, where a friendly man talked me through the quirks in my stop tap (who’d have thought that it would be so hard to turn
a tap off and drain a system). Now I suppose I ought to start mopping. Then I suppose I ought to find out what’s burst, and why.
Alongside all of this, I need to work out how to stop my washing machine from being so confused and let me have my bedsheets back. I don’t think the engineers that programmed it ever
thought of the possibility that the water supply might be interrupted mid-cycle.
Last weekend, I found myself in Macclesfield to celebrate the engagement of Liz and Simon. Highlights in brief included:
Board games with the happy couple and their friends, as well as the Aberites who were present. Just like old-school Geek Nights.
Liz & Simon’s awesome new house. Also, their cats, one of whom took a special interest in Bryn‘s crotch for the
duration of his visit.
Seeing people I don’t see often enough. Meeting lots of fabulous new people.
A surprising heavy dump of snow, tramping around in it, and attempting to sledge on a sleigh made from – by the looks of things – a plank of wood and two chair legs (not
particularly successful).
Tasty pizza. Followed by the chef coming out to ask me how it was, presumably because I’d been overheard talking about the art of pizza making, the consistency of their dough, etc.:
I’ve been eating a lot of pizza, recently, as I’ll explain in a future post.
Dancing until late to awful music on a knackered old sound system by a foulmouthed transvestite DJ. It’s always a pleasure to get the chance to dance with Liz, one of the few people
who seems to enjoy flailing around to music almost as much as I do.
Brief game of I Have Never… in Liz & Simon’s kitchen, after the night out: even more “just like old times” than old-style Geek Night, for a handful of us at least.
Today, I had to explain to somebody that Mozilla Firefox is free*.
Let me elaborate slightly. Today, I had to explain to an IT professional that Mozilla Firefox is free.
Let me go a tiny bit further. Today, I had to explain to an IT professional with decades of experience, working for an very large government-funded body, that Mozilla Firefox
is free. This isn’t some kid who got started on Windows XP. This is a man who remembers the first browser war. A man who works on UNIX systems in his day-to-day work, I gather. A man who should know better. Surely! Surely?
This is where your tax money is going. I think the UK FOSS advocacy scene just died a little inside.
A few months ago, I spent one lunchtime writing a One-Time Pad Encryption/Decryption Engine in
Javascript. I’d meant to blog about it at the time, but I forgot, but I came across it again today and thought it was cool enough to share with you all.
If you already appreciate why that’s cool, go play with it. If you don’t, allow me to explain.
What is a One-Time Pad and why is it awesome?
One-time pads are a form of cryptography which are simple enough to do by hand (you don’t need a computer, but it helps), versatile enough to transport any message, and – this is the
clever part – completely unbreakable.
Yes, completely unbreakable. It doesn’t matter if you have a billion supercomputers and a billion years, a one-time pad is mathematically sound. So long as it’s used properly,
it’s unbreakable, but it’s the difficulty and discipline required in using them properly – as well as difficulties in finding secure ways to share keys over long distances – that makes
them impractical for widespread use.
They did, however, see a lot of use in espionage during the Second World War and the Cold War, and continue to be used today for some diplomatic messages, as well as occasionally by
particularly paranoid civilians.
So what’s the story?
You’re probably familiar with the concept of a Caesar Cipher – you may have
even played with them as a child – which is perhaps most-often seen nowadays in the form of ROT13.
Put simply, a caesar cipher “rotates” letters through the alphabet, so perhaps A becomes B, B becomes C, C becomes D, and so on (in this example, Z would become A). So my message “IF
YOU READ THIS YOU ARE GAY” becomes “JG ZPV SFBE UIJT ZPV BSF HBZ”. I can send that message to you, having already agreed with you the code, and you can roll each letter back by one (so
A becomes Z, B becomes A, etc.), to get back the original message.
This is fundamentally flawed and offer no real security at all, of course. But suppose we made a couple of enhancements to our plain old Caesar Cipher. First, let’s add some punctuation
to our alphabet (space, full stop, comma – we’ll treat these as letters in their own right which come after ‘Z’). Then, instead of rotating each letter in our message the same number of
steps around, we’ll vary it. So let’s agree that the first letter will rotate 3 places, the second by 18, and the third by 11: then the fourth by 3 again, the fifth by 18, the sixth by
11, and so on. If we encode the same message now, we get:
I becomes L (rotated by 3)
F becomes X (rotated by 18)
[space] becomes I (rotated by 11)
Y becomes a comma (,)
And so on. Suddenly that’s a lot more secure than our plain old Caesar Cipher! Congratulations: you just invented the Vigenère Cipher. Unfortunately for you, it’s almost 500 years old already. Even more unfortunately, it’s still not very secure. It’s
fine for passing notes in class, but it won’t do for sending orders to your agent on the other side of the Iron Curtain!
How is a One-Time Pad different?
The “key” to the cipher we used above is 3, 18, 11, and the problem is that the key ends up being re-used (repeated) throughout the course of the message. If the message was the word
“ELF” (encrypted to “HAQ”), and we agreed never to use that same key again, then anybody who intercepted the message – even if they knew we were using a Vigenère Cipher – wouldn’t know
what we’d said, except to say that it had three or fewer letters. We could equally have said “MAN” (using the key 8, 17, 8), “EAT” (using the key 0, 17, 14), or “EGG” (using the key 0,
23, 1). If we ever used the same key – 3, 18, 11 – again, our code would become vulnerable to frequency analysis, which is a technique for working out what the key might be based on the likelyhood of particular letters or words
(especially common ones) being used in combination.
It’s pretty easy to see how to fix this: all you have to do is to choose a key that is at least as long as the message you want to encrypt, and never reuse the key.
This is how a one-time pad works. Suppose you and I agree a series of numbers, like this: 64191 25746 89891 93406 33604 89879. You keep a copy, and
I keep a copy, and we never tell anybody else those numbers, or the order in which they appear.
When I want to send you a message, I first convert that message into a series of numbers, using a codebook or codetable. In the example codetable below – which has been optimised for
the English language – the most-commonly used letters are represented by one digit each, while less-frequently used numbers are represented by two digits. So the message “STEAL THE
PANTIES” becomes 82832 17890 83752 80148 33282. It’s important to remember that this still isn’t encrypted; it’s just encoded: turned into a format suitable for encryption.
If we often talk about “panties” in our messages (and who doesn’t?), we might add that word to our codebook to make it faster to write: for example, we might assign it the code “11” –
in the table above, the prefix “99” means “look it up in the codebook”, so instead of writing “panties” as “80148 33282”, we’d write it as “9911” – cold war spies had whole dictionaries
of most-common words assigned to numbers to make them shorter to write out! That makes our message: 82832 17890 83752 99110. In this particular implementation, we add a padding zero to
make it up to a nice round block of five digits.
Next, we encrypt the message using our pre-arranged secret key, 64191 25746 89891 93406 33604 89879. To do this, we just take each digit in the message and add it to each digit in the
key, ignoring any “tens” column. So 8 plus 6 is (1)4, 2 plus 4 is 6, 8 plus 1 is 9, and so on, to get our encrypted message.
All you have to do to decode it is run the whole thing backwards. From each digit in the message, deduct the corresponding value in the key – if you get any negative numbers, just add
10 to them so that they’re not negative any more. Then run the resulting encoded number through your codebook to get back the secret message.
In practice, using a codebook is optional, but very-highly recommended. In the basic codebook I’ve provided with my implementation, the word
“condition” goes down from being “71547 23833 54” to just “99114 7”. A well-designed codebook will contain not only common words in your language, but anticipated words for the things
that you expect to talk about in your messages (like “MISSION”, “CAPTURED”, and – of course – “PANTIES”).
Messages encrypted using one-time pads are so secure that it’s safe to send the message itself completely in the clear, which is exactly what we used to do. Especially during the cold
war, but still today (and increasingly), governments have been able to communicate with spies in foreign countries simply by broadcasting strings of numbers over conventional radio,
from what are called numbers stations by radio enthusiasts (and also by
conspiracy theorists, of course). Of course, nowadays it’s perhaps more-feasible to send many kinds of messages by e-mail – and there are a number of one-time pad systems optimised for
fully-computerised use, although there exists a greater risk of being traced online than by simply tuning in a radio.
Now: go have a play!
Click the link – One-Time Pad Encryption/Decryption Engine in Javascript – to try out my
one-time pad engine and encrypt and decrypt a few messages of your own. It’s quite deliberately written in a way which does not communicate with my server at all, once the program has
downloaded (unplug your computer from your Internet connection if you like, and you’ll find that it still works), so I’m not able to see what you’re encrypting. You can use your own
codebook if you like, and the entire source code for the page should be reasonably easy to read, if you’re that way inclined. Have fun!
However, you certainly shouldn’t actually use it for passing secret messages around: read the caveats below if you can’t work out why for yourself!
Caveats
The first challenge with using one-time pads is finding a good secret key. People have used all kinds of things – patterns in music, entire text of books – that are all flawed and
imperfect. The only secret key good enough for use in a one time pad is a cryptographically-random set of number. The random numbers generated by a conventional computer are not good
enough: I suggest you get yourself five ten-sided dice and roll them all simultaneously, writing down the numbers which come up as they appear in front of you from left to right.
Repeatedly. Yes, this is a boring process. For convenience, my implementation will generate random numbers for you, if you like, but they’re not good enough for actual use. The United
States broke a German one-time pad in 1944 because the machine they used to generate the random numbers was not sufficiently random.
The second challenge is getting your secret key to the friend to whom you want to send secret messages. This must be done in person. If you transmit it by any other
medium, it could already have been compromised. Even if you encrypt it, the system can only be considered to be as good as that encryption, which defeats the point entirely.
During the cold war, KGB spies were issued with tiny keybooks like the one shown on the right. A book this small can be hidden in any number of places, as anybody who’s been geocaching knows! After receiving and decoding a message, the page used to provide the key could easily be
burned, eaten, or otherwise destroyed.
A third challenge comes from the fact that no key must ever be re-used. As soon as a key is re-used, the code is no longer unbreakable. A combined U.S effort broke a 1945 Soviet
one-time pad after the same key was used several times: once the U.S. knew something about the contents of some of the messages (they contained leaked British intelligence), they were
able to partially break the key.
There must be no way for an unauthorised party to observe the plaintext before it has been encrypted or after it has been decrypted. Your desktop PC won’t do, because your enemy can
read your screen through the wall, install
a keylogger, or just peep through your window!
And, of course, as with all cryptography, your system is only as secure as the people involved. If your friend can be bribed, blackmailed, tricked or tortured into giving up
information, the system fails. Obviously to maximise your ability to protect your system you should issue different keybooks to each of your trusted friends – this also helps to prevent
them from talking to one another and organising a coup against you!
Dan and Paul watch as Kit resets his GPS receiver and Fiona packs up a geocache
For those who’ve not heard about it before, geocaching is often described as “a global game of hide & seek played using GPS technology”. Personally, I prefer Kit’s explanation,
which is “using military satellites to find lost Tupperware”. Put simply, participants hide caches (often plastic stay-fresh containers) in interesting places around the globe,
and publish the GPS co-ordinates online on websites like Geocaching.com, then other participants try to find them.
Ruth helps Paul up a particularly steep slope
I suppose one could also describe the activity in the context of the pastimes it is most similar to. It could be described as being a little like rambling (although some caches are in
urban locations and many are reachable by car), orienteering (but generally with less need to be able to triangulate points and read a map and more ability to use a GPS effectively and
understand its limitations), hide & seek (finding things that have been hidden rather than people, of course), and one of any number of hobbies ending with “-spotting” (each geocache
has a unique number, and many participants are trying to visit as many as possible, or to visit particular subsets of them).
A small geocache wrapped in grey tape to help camoflage it, the roll of tape, and a TomTom navigation system (being used as a backup GPS receiver).
I suppose another way of describing it might be in the context of the hot cold game, which you probably played as a kid: where while looking for something hidden, the hider calls out “warmer, warmer,
colder, warmer again, hot!” as an indication to the seeker as to whether or not they’re on the right track. This analogy is particularly apt when one gets within a few metres of the
cache, at which point GPS devices become almost useless at telling you which direction to go in (and of uncertain value at telling you how far away you are – when in a wooded area or
surrounded by tall buildings, GPS can be thrown off by tens or even hundreds of metres).
Ruth watches as Kit gets a reading for the cache that Fiona and Paul are preparing to plant
Since Kit and Fiona’s visit, a number of us have jumped right in to geocaching. Paul, Ruth, Jimmy, Claire and I are all now represented on the site: as pacifist_049 (Paul), fleeblewidget (Ruth), JimEsk (Jimmy & Claire), and avapoet (me).
Kit and Ruth prepare to hide one of Paul's first caches
I can’t speak for all of these people, but there’s something about geocaching that’s really grabbed my interest. Since their visit, I’ve been out and found a number of the caches in
and around Aberystwyth, and I’ve even hidden the first of my own. At the very least, I’ve been glad of the excuse to make better use of my bike, but more than
that: I’ve been pleased to get around and see parts of the town and countryside that I don’t normally visit or look that closely at. Yes, even when I’ve ended up stuck up on a hill in the
dark (that’ll teach me to go ‘caching after work in the short days of winter!).
Geocaching way up the Rheidol valley
Perhaps strangest, though, is my (so-far limited) experience of the local geocaching community. After you’ve visited a few sites around here you begin to notice patterns in the names of
the people who’ve been there before you, and you start seeing the same aliases appearing again and again. And in a town the size of Aberystwyth, it’s invariably only a matter of time
before you make contact with, well, everybody.
Paul, Kit, Fiona and I wandering back from a cache (sorry about the wonkiness of the picture: this one was taken by Ruth, and she's all wobbly and stuff).
At the weekend I was in Morrisons, buying plastic tubs and other supplies with which to make caches – I suppose that in itself might have made me stand out: who goes to Morrisons to buy
a stack of small Tupperware boxes and notepads small enough to fit inside them? – when a man come over to me. He looked at me, as if trying to work out where he knew me from, and then
looked down at my hands and saw what I was carrying. “Avapoet?” he asked. “Treedoctor2000?” I replied. So there we have it, I’m officially part of the local geocaching community, and I didn’t even mean to.
Ruth finds a cache!
So there we have it, a glowing review for a fun new activity that if you haven’t tried, you ought to. If you own a GPS or even a modern mobile phone or even just a portable SatNav
system, you’ve probably got all you need to get started, and with almost a million caches around the globe, there are sure to be a few near you. So if you were waiting for my approval
before you went and did so, here it is.
Now get away from the computer and go do something outdoors!
Further Reading
More photos courtesy of my camera and Kit’s camera. I’ve been
careful to use only photos that don’t give away huge clues about where caches are in this blog post, but there may be spoilers in the other photos: you have been warned!
Friday night was Murder… In Space!, our most recent murder mystery party. This is the second of our murder mystery nights that I’ve been the author of (the first one was
Murder In The Reign Of Terror), and I took a lot of what I learned
from the experience of writing and co-hosting of that mystery… and then disregarded about half of it.
Me as the hologram of Ground Control Director Dan Griffin
One of the things that I thought we’d do differently from normal was a more “freeform” roleplaying experience. Instead of communal debates punctuated with pre-scripted dialogues, I
wanted to create an atmosphere that felt more… like a group of people trapped together, where one is a murderer! I wanted distrust and backstabbing, secrets and lies. So instead of
scripting dialogues and drip-feeding clues to the players between courses, I gave a lot more information “up front” and relied on the characters to develop their own social
interactions, with mixed success.
Captain Rusty Schweiper (Adam) issues a mission patch to reporter Robyn Morse (Claire)
As I expected, I disregarded my own suggestion to myself to refrain from committing to a date for the event until I’d written at least half of the materials. Unfortunately, this was
coupled with my incorrect assumption that writing a murder mystery in which I didn’t pre-script the dialogues would be somehow easier or faster than the contrary. Also my
mistake in thinking that writing for ten people would only be 25% harder than writing for eight (in actual fact, complexity grows exponentially, because each person you add to a murder
mystery has a theoretical relationship with everybody added before them).
Little red pieces of paper abound in the early stages of the game
The game proved challenging early on. Without the structure of initial dialogue and with no formal introduction phase, it took some time for the players to get into character and to
understand what it was that they wanted to achieve and how they might go about it. In addition, a lot of the characters held their cards very close to their chest,
metaphorically-speaking, to being with, resulting in a great shortage of “free” information during the first half of the game. However, the “space age” multicoloured cocktails did their
work quickly, and after a sufficiency of liquid lubrication virtually everybody was slotting into their position in the group.
Helen Shaman (Ruth), the biologist
Once the players got into the swing of things, including (for those who’d attended this kind of event before) culturing an understanding that it was encouraged, perhaps even necessary,
to meet up with fellow crewmembers in smaller groups and swap information and plot items – something that was new to this particular adventure – everything went a lot more smoothly. As
I’d hoped, characters would take time to creep away in twos and threes and gossip about the others behind their backs. At least one character attempted to eavesdrop on others’
conversations, which was particularly amazing to see. In addition to the usual goal of “detect the murderer”/”make a clean getaway”, I’d issued each character with a set of secondary
(and tertiary) goals that they’d like to achieve, typically related to learning something, preventing others from learning something, or acquiring or retaining a particular plot item.
Some characters had more complex goals, relating to keeping the blame on or off particular other characters, making good early guesses, or being the first to achieve particular
milestones. I felt that this added a richness to the characters which is otherwise sometimes lacking, and it seemed to work particularly well for helping the players play their roles,
although I should probably have put the goals higher up on each player’s character sheet in order to make it clearer how important they were to the overall plot.
Robyn Morse (Claire), Sir Richard Virgin (Matt P), and Steven Win (JTA) in a private discussion
As usual, it was inspiring to see characters I’d invented brought to life in the interpretation of their players. As with Murder In The Reign Of Terror, I’d quite-deliberately avoided
assigning characters to players, instead letting Ruth do that based on my preliminary character
descriptions, thereby providing me with a number of surprises (and an even greater number of interesting coincidences) when it came to seeing how everybody chose to portray my ideas.
Particular credit must go to Matt R for his stunning performance as the self-aware android, TALOS-III,
and to Adam for the extraordinary amount of effort he put into his costume (including a silver jumpsuit, “moon
boots”, and a cap and t-shirt emblazoned with his name, insignia, and the mission name). That said, everybody did an amazing job of making their character believable and love (or
hate)-able for the characteristics they portrayed: there were moments at which it was easy to forget that this was all make-believe.
Adam’s “moon boots”
As usual, Ruth put an unbelievable amount of work into making the food fit the theme, and she’d tried to have food that represented the nationalities of all of the astronauts present,
in addition to making the food look like “space food”, even where it wasn’t (which resulted in the up-side that the foil containers out of which dinner was served needed no washing up
when the party was finished). She’d also put a lot of thought into “space age” drinks, which mostly consisted of brightly-coloured cocktails prepared from ingredients brought by
individual guests, which worked really well (although I apologise for the disparity that I’ve since discovered in the varied prices of the drinks people were asked to bring).
Pointing at the murderer, pilot James McDivvy.
As seems to have become traditional – although I swear that this is just another one of those coincidences – Paul‘s
character, James McDivvy, turned out to be the murderer: he’d poisoned the victim using carbon monoxide in his space suit’s air supply when he went for a spacewalk. In the photo above
he’s seen holding a data disk containing the program that controls the TALOS-III android: he played upon the fact that nobody could find it to imply that whoever had it must have
somehow used it to reprogram the android to perform the murder, playing upon everybody’s natural suspicion of the creepy robot amongst them, and this worked well for him, distracting
many of the others from the evidence that would have implicated him. You can also clearly see Rory‘s (Akiyama
Toyohiro) fabulous SG-1/Japanese space geek costume, including his digital scrolling Twitter feed hanging around his neck.
Angharad (Svetlana Svetyona), a first-time Murder Night attendee
As usual, there are lessons to be learned. In the hope that I’ll pay some attention to myself next time (yes, there’ll be a “next time”, hopefully before I leave Aber – and I’m hoping to make something even
bigger and cooler out of it), I’d like Future Dan to remember the following lessons:
I know you’ll ignore this anyway, Future Dan, but do not commit to a date for a murder mystery until you’ve got at least half of it written already. There’s lots
of stress, lots of panic, and a higher freqency of typos and other embarassing mistakes when you write the last few thousand words in the last day or two.
Similarly, have more leeway for additional characters: I know it feels like “wasted words” to write for characters who’ll probably never be used, but it’s better to plan for about
10% of your cast to be playing optional characters, so that when they pull out (or more people want to come) you’re already prepared.
Plan for a structured introduction round in which the host more-fully explains “the story so far”, and perhaps pre-script the first conversation(s) that players are likely to engage
in, in order to make breaking into character a little less like diving in at the deep end.
In the unlikely event that I’m not the only person who uses SuperGenPass to manage my passwords and MicroB on Maemo on
my Nokia N900, here’s a few tips that I thought I’d share (they’re also valid on the N800 and N810
and “hacker edition” N770s, too, I expect):
You don’t have a Bookmarks Toolbar (where would you put it on a 3½ inch screen?), so once you’ve customised your SuperGenPass bookmarklet, you’ll need to click-and-hold on the
generated link, and then select “Add bookmark” to save it to your bookmarks).
Use it as normal: either fill your master password into the form and click your Bookmarks menu and select the bookmarklet, or select the bookmarklet and give it your master
password. Don’t forget when using complex forms or changing passwords that Maemo provides a full clipboard so you can copy/paste passwords around where the need arises (thankfully quite
rarely).
If you’re irritated by the “You have requested an encrypted page that contains some unencrypted information” warnings that you see when logging into SSL-secured websites (and the
fact that unlike desktop Firefox, you can’t turn it off from the settings), here’s how you disable it:
Agree to the warning page, if you’re presented with one
Type “security.warn_viewing_mixed” into the search box, or browse the properties list for that option
Select it by clicking on it, and tap the Enter key to toggle it from true to false.
I don’t yet know the reason for the fleeting “Maximum number of characters reached” message, but it doesn’t seem to impact on functionality of SuperGenPass. Does anybody else know
what it’s about or how it can be suppressed?
The wedding was Andy and Siâns, of course, and they got married
yesterday in Cardiff. Unfortunately, Ruth, JTA and I’s plans to go down there were conspired against by the combined forces of all of the worst luck imaginable. Allow me to elaborate.
The plan was simple. As soon as JTA could finish work, we’d suit-up, hop into Miriam (Ruth & JTA’s loveable, quirky litle car), and rocket down to Cardiff to join
the party. And it could have gone so well, as a plan – JTA managed to finish work early, I dug out one of the most awesome ties ever, we’d even packed up a stack of inflatable beds so
that anybody else who was planning to crash on the happy couple’s living room floor could also sleep in comfort.
But the problem was Miriam. Miriam, you little beast! She’d apparently been “sounding funny” during Ruth’s trip over to Aber on Thursday night, and – as a precaution – we decided to
take her for a quick run out along the A44 to check that she was going to be okay for the journey to Cardiff. The plan wouldn’t be foiled even if there was a problem: we already had a
backup plan to rent a car (probably for a whole week, as Ruth and JTA will somehow need to get to and from Oxford over the coming week).
It turns out that Ruth getting a second opinion – mine – was a good idea: yes, Miriam “sounds funny”, if by “sounds funny” you mean “judders and vibrates once you get above about 1000
revs, increasingly violently as you get above third gear, and ocassionally cuts out entirely at higher speeds.” Honestly, I suspect she might have been safe, but she certainly
wasn’t healthy, so, after (correctly, it later turns out) guessing that the problem was that one or more cylinders were periodically (read: virtually always) failing to fire, we ditched
her and went looking for a rental.
We toddled along to Europcar (don’t be fooled by the picture: that’s not what
Aberystwyth Europcar’s offices look like), and asked what they had available for hire for a week. “Nothing,” came the reply. “What about just for today?” we asked. “Nothing,” came the
reply, again, “We always sell out at about this time on a Friday.”
They suggested we try Hertz out in Llanbadarn, so I gave them a bell. “You want it for today, do you?” came the reply, in a distinctly Welsh accent twinged with only a
little incredulity. There was the sound of paperwork being filed in the background. “I’m afraid we’ve got nothing at all today.”
“Is there anybody else I could try, other than you and Europcar?” I asked, “We’re trying to get to a wedding in Cardiff and our car has broken down.”
“You might try – what are they called? – AV Van Hire, out in Glanyrafon. I think that they used to have a car that they used to rent out, sometimes.” This was our last chance, so I
thanks the lady from Hertz and went about phoning her competitor in the industrial estate.
I explained the situation to the friendly-sounding man who answered the phone.
“Yeah. We’ve got a Ford Galaxy here that you can borrow.”
“Really? That’s great! How much for a day’s rental?”
“Yell you what – you get over here and we’ll talk about that when you get here.” Hmm. Not sure how to take that – leaves the opportunity to haggle, I suppose, but he could be the kind
who wants to size-up his customers first, and the fact that I’m wearing a suit won’t necessarily work financially in our favour. Still, running out of options at this point, so Ruth & I
grabbed JTA and jumped into a taxi out to the industrial estate.
Finding the place was more than a little challenging. The taxi driver didn’t know where they were, so eventually we just had him drop us off at the DHL Parcel Depot and called the
rental place again. He said he’d send round the car to pick us up, and a few minutes later it arrived.
The Galaxy had taken a bump at some point in it's life, so - not wanting to risk being ripped-off for causing damage that already existed - I took this picture
“It’s… big,” said Ruth, as we hopped into the Ford
Galaxy (Mk2). And she was right – you could comfortably seat seven in this beast. Bear in mind that Miriam’s a very small car – she sometimes look as if the two rear passenger doors
were added as an afterthought – and you can see why what is, essentially, only a little smaller than a minibus, might be a little intimidating to her.
The chap at the rental place was as friendly as he’d sounded, and, after talking a little about fuel economy and turning circles, made us a really good offer. “Great,” I said, “We’ll
take it!” We wandered upstairs into the plywood “office” that hung above their maintenance garage.
“Have you got your license?” he asked, and Ruth produced hers. He started tapping details into a computer and filling out forms, and then stopped and looked at it again. “Umm: how long
have you been driving?” he asked.
“18 months,” she said.
“And you?” he said to JTA.
“17?” he guessed, and then checked his license to confirm that this guess was correct. The friendly man turned to me.
“I’m taking my test next month,” I replied.
He pointed at the documents in front of him, where it clearly stated that while the insurance company that they used could insure anybody over the age of 21, they needed to have two
years of driving experience. He flicked backward and forth through the paperwork, looking for an exception clause (they were a reasonably liberal-minded insurer, even willing to take on
drivers with convictions, but had no flexibility on this one clause… unlike, we later learned, Europcar’s insurers), before giving up.
And that was that. Our last hope, sat out in their driveway, ready for us to rent but illegal for us to take off the premises: as good as useless. We’d checked the public transport
options already and determined that the best we could hope to achieve might be to arrive at Andy & Sian’s house right as they happy couple would be retiring to their matrimonial bed
(can you think of a better way to make yourself welcome than that?), and that’s if there weren’t any delays. Dejected, we finally gave up. The friendly man had one of his employees
(possibly his son?) drive us back to Aber.
Act Two – Doing Something Else Instead
So, in true Friday night tradition, we did what we usually do: had Troma Night, our regular weekly film night. Of course, few could make it (just Sam; Paul visited briefly; and Kit and Fiona turned up late on). In accordance with the prophecy, and perhaps a little in order to feel like we were
less-badly separated from our friends on their special day, we themed Troma Night around them.
We stayed in our wedding-wear, watched films about weddings, toasted the happy couple, and wallowed in the fact that we could’t be there with them. Briefly – and with thanks to Matt R – we got to speak to the bride by phone and wish her well, which was nice, but it’s not quite the same.
We promise that we’ll try to get down there and visit you sometime soon!
Champagne and flowers at Troma Night 290
Folks Dressed-Up At Troma Night 290
Some Of The Films For Troma Night 290
Ruth pops open (yet) another bottle of bubbly at Troma Night 290
Sam arrives at Troma Night 290 - for those of you who haven't met Sam yet, he's the leader of a small nocturnal group of filing-cabinet kickers up on campus, if you know what I mean.
Dan and Ruth at Troma Night 290
JTA and Ruth at Troma Night 290
The other evening, I was woken (yes, I was asleep at 6pm, might blog about why that was on a later date) by a man from one of the energy companies trying to get me to consider changing
my gas supply to them. I’m not keen on door-to-door sales at the best of times, which, coupled with my why-have-you-woken-me-up attitude and a hint of my mischievousness, lead to a
conversation that I’m sure he won’t soon forget.
Gas Man:
Hi, I’m from [name of energy company – he was keen to show off his shiny ID badge] and… oh; I’m sorry, have I just woken you up? Is this a bad time?
Dan:
/yawning/ Yeah, but I’m up now. What can I do for you?
Gas Man:
I might be able to save you money on your gas bill. Can I ask who you’re with now?
Dan:
I’m with [name of my energy company].
Gas Man:
Right, and do you pay quarterly or monthly?
Dan:
Monthly, by direct debit.
Gas Man:
Okay. Do you know how much you spend per month on gas?
Dan:
Hey, do you have any samples?
Gas Man:
What? Umm… I’ve got a leaflet if you’d like…
Dan:
No: samples. Of the gas your company provides.
Gas Man:
/laughing it off as a joke/ Ha! No… so do you know how much your average bill…
Dan:
/completely serious face/ I’m afraid I’d have to smell your gas before I could make any kind of decision.
Gas Man: /stunned silence/
Dan:
I’ve been with a few different gas companies over the years. When I first moved in I was with [name of energy company]. Their gas smelled like walnuts, and I
don’t like walnuts, so I switched to [name of another energy company], and their gas used to smell like cottage cheese, which was fine, but eventually it started smelling
like it had gone off which means it probably was actual cottage cheese: which is great, but you can’t just put cottage cheese in your pipe and never replace it, can you? So that’s
when I switched to [name of my energy company], about three months ago. Their gas smells like watermelons, which is perfectly good. I like watermelons.
/pause/
So you see; I couldn’t possibly buy your company’s gas unless I could smell it first.
/I continue staring at him with wide, “I inhale flammable gases for fun” look/
Gas Man:
Umm. All the gas is the same. It doesn’t matter which company supplies it: it’s all the same gas.
Dan:
Oh.
/puzzled look/
Then I guess I’ll stick with the gas I’ve got, if yours is no different. Goodbye.
/closes door/
(I assumed he’d already have head of this, of course)
I’ve just got myself a new mobile phone, and I thought I’d spend a moment to gloat about some of it’s more awesome features (and mutter under my breath about a few of the things that
are less-fabulous about it).
So, my new phone is a Nokia N900. You’re not likely to have seen many of these
floating around, yet, because they’re new to the UK and they’re currently in somewhat short supply, but thanks to some careful negotiation I’ve gotten my clammy mits on one just a
little ahead of the curve.
I’m now loathe to say what I was initially inclined to about it – that it’s quite a remarkable phone – because it’s not really a phone (although it is quite remarkable). As somebody who
has always gone for smartphones with heaps of geeky features, I’ve often gone through conversations like the one in the comic, above: where somebody has said “but can it make calls?”
These comments tend to come from people who want a phone that makes calls, maybe sends texts, and little else, and often this “purist” view of mobile telephony somebody gives them a
strange superiority complex (or perhaps it’s just a backlash against the feature-creep of modern portable devices: who knows). As for me, I don’t care – I want all of those
extra features. I couldn’t imagine any more owning a phone without – at least – a fully-featured web browser, camera, bluetooth, wifi, and the capability for me to install (and ideally
develop) my own applications onto it, such as connectivity tools, an instant messenger, and so on.
A Nokia N900 on a phone call
However, the Nokia N900 is the first communicator – yes, that’s the word I’m going to use, instead – where I’ve honestly felt that the telephony features “come second”. I suppose it’s
the result of the natural progression of Nokia’s Nxxx range of
PDAs that this should be the case – the N900 is the first in the series to actually support use of a mobile phone network at all; at least directly. In the device’s default
configuration, out-of-the-box, supposing you wanted to make a cellular call, you’d need to:
Switch desktops (by “swiping” one desktop along) or access the applications menu (by tapping the on-screen button for that purpose).
Tap the “Phone” icon, which by default sits in 6th place on the list. Yes, 6th.
Dial the number you wanted to call.
That’s about 66% steps more than just about any other phone ever made. (okay, there’s actually a faster way, but supposing you wanted to exclusively use the touch-screen interface, the
above instructions are correct) I know a lot of people who would be put off by that, but I’m not one of them: I’m well past the point where phone calls are the primary thing I
use my phone for!
There’s a few things that make the Nokia N900 remarkable by comparison to the phones I’ve had before:
Touchscreen (& hidden keyboard)
Superficially, the major change to my previous phones is the addition of a touchscreen, which seems to be The Thing if you want to make a smartphone these days, thanks to Apple’s
innovations in that area. Unusually, the N900 also has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The slide-out keyboard takes some getting used to, because it’s best operated by your
thumbs, which isn’t the way I’m used to using a keyboad. It also makes the phone almost twice as thick as the iPhone and slightly thicker than the HTC Magic,
which may be a turn-off to those who like their devices skinny (again, not something that’s ever been a concern to me).
I’m quite pleased with the touchscreen. There’s a stylus embedded in the edge of the case (this is a resistive touchscreen, not a capacitative one like the iPhone, so a stylus can be
used), which can be good for clicking tiny links on web pages without zooming in, sketching, and so on, but mostly I’ve just been using my big chunky fingers and that’s worked fine.
While the hardware’s multitouch-capable, the factory-installed software isn’t (more on that later), presumably to avoid a lawsuit (there are a lot of complicated patents in
that area right now), but having never owned a multitouch-capable phone I don’t miss it. Instead, there’s a good deal of standardised gestures – for example, drawing a spiral in a
clockwise or anticlockwise direction can be used to zoom in and out.
The keyboard noticibly lacks a tab key, norkies (angle-brackets), and a few other uncommon pieces of punctuation, which is slightly disappointing (for a geek phone!), because acessing
these using the alternate method is just slightly slower than would be ideal. Perhaps these could have been supplied as “special” characters on some of the keys which have no alternate
function (e.g. the cursor keys): still, it should be reasonably easy to write this kind of functionality.
Operating System & architecture
Maemo OS screenshot
A particularly unusual feature of the Nokia N900 is it’s choice of operating system. It’s not that Linux-based smartphones are particularly rare per se – after all, Google Android is Linux-powered and the iPhone OS is based on a BSD kernel – but the thinking that’s behind the N900 that is unusual. You see, the N900 gives you root as-standard. If
you want to install a different Linux distribution or completely change the one that comes with the device, you can – without “jailbreaking” the device or invalidating your warranty.
The standard operating system for the N900, Maemo 5, is based on Debian Linux but with Matchbox
and Hildon providing the GUI. This means that the entire operating system is open-source and virtually free of patents and restrictions, and the community support is quite significant.
Plus, there’s something distinctly sexy about opening up a terminal on your new phone and typing “sudo apt-get install dosbox” onto it, and a few minutes later having a fully-functional
DOS emulator running in your pocket.
I suppose you have to be my kind of geek to truly appreciate that.
Fresh from the factory, the N900 comes with the usual selection of tools – phone, SMS (Nokia have finally improved their stone-age predictive text system to a modern one with
support for word-completion, Markov chains, and so on), address book, web browser
(based on Mozilla Firefox, and with Flash 9.6 support – there’s nothing quite
like watching Flash videos on your mobile, stutter-free), etc. There’s quite a lot more reliance on the community than on other devices: for example, despite the inlusion of an FM tuner
in the hardware, there’s no software to support it unless you install it yourself. As a Linux geek, that suits me down to the ground, but this isn’t a phone for everybody – it’ll never
be popular and it won’t hit the mainstream in the way that the iPhone and Android-powered phones have.
Want support for Ogg Vorbis in your media player (damn right you do): just install a community-supported codec package. Same goes for video formats, whatever applications or games you
want, and so on. There’s a package to readily allow plain old Debian repo packages to “just work” on it, too, without recompilation, so there’s an immense number of applications already
available without even having to go near the Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to the Android Marketplace and the Apple App Store.
The hardware
Nokia N900 with keybord extended
If you’re the kind of geek who cares, the hardware for this device is really quite spectacular. But if you’re that kind of geek, you already know where to look it up… and if you’re not,
you don’t need me to repeat it. Suffice to say that the N900 is nippy and responsive even when performing intensive tasks (like simultaneously restoring archives from parity files while
listening to radio repeats on iPlayer and playing 3D-accelerated video games), thanks to a generous amount of RAM and a good seperation of responsibilities between the three (yes,
three) individual processor cores.
This is a geek’s device, and it comes with all kinds of surprising extras for developers to tap into. As well as Bluetooth, the tilt sensors and accelerometers (some idiot has already
written an app that detects how high you can throw your N900 based on what planet you’re on and the accelerometer readings – sounds like a quick way to break your new toy, to me!), two
cameras (one a 5MP one, like the high-end Nseries phones), it’s even got an infared transmitter, so you’re only a copy of LIRC away from a universal remote, too.
Thanks to last year’s industry standards
agreement, the N900 uses the new “standardised” mobile phone charger, so at least you shouldn’t have to throw out your charger ever again (at least, until mobile phones start
charging by induction, as standard), and you’ll always be able to charge from USB. But in a genuine bit of Nokia care, the N900 box also contains an adapter that can be used to convert
any old-style or even old-old-style Nokia charger into the new standard format, which is a world of awesome (what else was I going to do with my collection of Nokia chargers?). Thanks
for thinking of us, Nokia. Oh: and the environment, I guess.
And now, the things I don’t like
It’s not all rainbows and kittens, though. There’s a few things about the N900 that haven’t won all of my praise and support just yet:
Why do virtually all of the default apps run exclusively in either “portrait” or “landscape” mode? Some applications will automatically switch when you rotate the phone, but not all
of them: personally, I like to be able to browse the web in “portrait” from time to time! I’m sure it’ll be patched soon enough, but it’s a minor annoyance for now.
It would have been nice to have a physical “Task Manager” button on the device, for when a full-screen application has made the standard one inaccessible (this isn’t the iPhone –
this is a true multitasking machine – so being able to switch apps “fast” would be nice, like we could on Symbian). On the other hand, there’s an app for that.
There’s no native A2DP support, so
those “next track”/”previous track” buttons on your Bluetooth headset are officially useless. Would this really have been so hard to have in the standard package? Can somebody write it,
please?
There are a few teething bugs in the first release of the Mail For Exchange package, which I use to synchronise my address book and calendar with my online accounts, resulting in
some synchronisations simply failing (although failing-safely, of course: no data was damaged). Considering that Nokia have had working code to do this for several years now, porting it
and then testing the port really shouldn’t have been so difficult.
So there we have it
An official thumbs-up from me, so long as you’re a geek and don’t mind the fact that this phone is – for the next month or two, I suspect – going have have the kinds of teething
problems I’ve listed above. I’ll reiterate that this isn’t a phone for a regular Joe: if you’re not going to appreciate the freedom you’ve got with a device like this, you’d be better
to save your money and get a HTC Nexus One or iPhone 3GS, or hold on for a couple
of months and check out the spectacular-looking Sony
Ericcson XPERIA X10.
The N900 is a phone for people with balls and a passion for the most open of open-source. And it’s awesome.
Normal blogging will resume shortly, but I just wanted to quickly take advantage of a period of strong mobile signal as I sit on this Thames Travel bus (oh yeah: I’m in Oxford for a few
days) to share with you a feeling of warm fuzziness I experienced earlier today. (note: this blog post took a few days to get “finished”: I’m now stuck in a small town outside
Oxford by heavy snow)
In her latest blog post, my sister Becky writes about achieving a couple of things on her “to-do before I die” list. And when I
read about her revelations about the nature of domestic abuse and her selfless willingness to go out of her way to help her fellow man, I was filled with an immense sense of
pride.
I’ll remind you that, unlike about a fifth of the regular readers of this blog, my sister has no formal training or experience in active listening or counselling skills. She’s never
been taught how to listen without prejudice, how to build rapport, or how to show empathy. She knows that this certainly isn’t part of her job description. What we’re looking at there
is plain old, genuine human compassion. And it makes me proud not only of her – as my sister – but also of humankind in general, that this kind of caring for one another still exists,
even for a stranger, within the general population. That’s simply awesome.
In other not-dissimilar human-compassion related news, Ruth and I were offered a lift – saving us a
two-mile walk through the snow, after midnight – by two complete strangers the other night, after our bus was cancelled. It’s been a good week for stories of people being nice to one
another, both in my immediate experience and in the news. I like it.
On the other hand: here the snow is thick and heavy! Paul and I made it to Preston in the end, after a series of train journeys along an unusual route (but,
remarkably, virtually all running on time). From Aberystwyth, it’s genuinely challenging to appreciate how significantly the recent snowfall has impacted on the rest of the UK. By Dyfi
Junction the train staff were warning about the conditions on the unploughed platforms, and at Manchester, unused platform ends lay heavy with slush piled up around the tracks.
Snow piles up in my dad’s garden – still several inches thick despite a damp night
The major roads are swept, but the side roads are piled high with drifts and it’s hard to see (or even feel) the speed bumps in the residential estates. Apparently, the other night one
of my sisters – Becky – had to drive into town to collect the other – Sarah – as she couldn’t get a
taxi home after a night out… because the taxi drivers were refusing to drive through the snow that littered my mum’s estate.
A cat’s footprints winding their way across my dad’s garden
It’s quite remarkable to see this much snow here – the most I’ve seen anywhere in England in about fourteen years. We may well be having a white Christmas yet!
Aberystwyth this morning. Not a patch of snow to be seen, not even on the hills.
This year, my plan was that my friend Paul and I would head up to Preston to spend Christmas with my family there. My
sisters even kindly offered to drive down and pick us up, which is nice , because the alternative for moving the presents I’ve got boxed up in my living room would be to strap them onto
a sled and find some livestock to tow them up North. I’m not sure where I’d find animals around here capable of running a sleigh: how many sheep do you think it takes to pull a grown
man, his clothes for a week, and a stack of gifts?
When I received a text this morning saying that Preston was, functionally-speaking, snowed-in, I was at least a little surprised. I opened the curtains: here in Aber it’s reasonably
warm, mild, and sunny, with not even a hint of snow – not even on the distant mountains. It’s hard to believe that from only a hundred or so miles away the snow is so thick that it’s
having to be ploughed off the road, and that in the South-East, drivers have had to spend the nights in their cars after roads became unusable.
So… I might make it out of Aber by Christmas. If anybody can tell me where the nearest magic reindeer farm with lax security is, it’d be appreciated.
This is how a one-time pad works. Suppose you and I agree a series of numbers, like this: 64191 25746 89891 93406 33604 89879. You keep a copy, and
I keep a copy, and we never tell anybody else those numbers, or the order in which they appear.
In practice, using a codebook is optional, but very-highly recommended. In the basic codebook I’ve provided with my implementation, the word
“condition” goes down from being “71547 23833 54” to just “99114 7”. A well-designed codebook will contain not only common words in your language, but anticipated words for the things
that you expect to talk about in your messages (like “MISSION”, “CAPTURED”, and – of course – “PANTIES”).
