Plotting with julia

Maybe you've already heard it: There's a new language on the block - Julia. She seems to be a hot contender for the new standard scientific computing language, maybe also replacing R for statistical analysis.

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Of course, it's a very young language, so they standard library is quite small right now. For example, you can also plot to the webinterface, not to …

Protecting your mails with GnuPG

You probably know that you can encrypt and sign your emails using GnuPG, and there's even a bunch of programs and plugins to make it easier for you. However, if you are like me and use Gmail's browser interface, there's no plugin for you. Your only choice is to copy & paste your mails to some external program, encrypt / decrypt them and paste them back into Gmail. Certainly not very comfortable.

Today, I set out to change this. I wrote a small Chrome extension which interfaces with GnuPG so you can encrypt and decrypt your mails directly from the browser. It …

Game of Life

Inspired by [cached]a post on reddit, I decided to write this Python implementation of Conway's Game of Life. To spice things up, there's a twist: The outer border continues to randomly seed the field with new cells.

Additionally, newly deceased cells slowly fade back to black to make things more interesting to watch.

Source code is of course available at [cached]GitHub

P2P DNS

I don't really like the direction of the "official" project, especially the part where they decided to use a central authortiy, so I started my own. This is a true distributed approach, for everything else we don't need to develop anything new.

The basic idea is that each and every node of the network caches all the domains we have. Before you cry foul, let's look at how much space this will really need.

Our DNS record has several parts:

• The domain itself. At 8 bit for one char, we'll assume a generous average length of 50 chars, which leaves …

Task Engine

Some years ago, I was fascinated by the inner workings of the games I played. I already had learned C++, so I set out to find out more about the libraries and techniques specific to graphics programming.

My journey began with [cached]NeHe, an excellent series of tutorials for OpenGL beginners. (The lessons are available in many languages, not just C++)

Next, I read up on engine design. Of course, ambitious as I was, I aimed for a fully scalable multi-threaded engine. Had I wanted to create an actual game, this would have led to endless frustration (as any game …