3 Good Things (again)

1. Been coding all day; it makes me feel more confident and safe

2. Parents tried to remember how I was as a child, which was somewhat helpful. [Cousin might've been Au, but is dead now. Dad did some online Au-tests, got high scores.]

3. Saw a few kind people -helping others. I slowly build an accurate picture of them, unintentionally, out of admiration I think.

Have you been coding anything you can tell us about or are there NDAs involved?

Mostly writing snippets and reading resources to understand this short post https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2024/08/14/places.html

Eventually, I will start implementing some linear algebra algorithms, if I manage to, but want to feel that I can do it idiomatically ("in readable rust").

I was thinking today whether we should get keyboard letters re-arranged so that we use 50/50 each hand, and later re-mapped some of my keys, "caps lock to escape" and "letter T to right shift" :-)

I read you wrote some C for frequency analysis for letters, bigrams, trigrams. How's that going?

Mostly writing snippets and reading resources to understand this short post https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2024/08/14/places.html

Eventually, I will start implementing some linear algebra algorithms, if I manage to, but want to feel that I can do it idiomatically ("in readable rust").

I was thinking today whether we should get keyboard letters re-arranged so that we use 50/50 each hand, and later re-mapped some of my keys, "caps lock to escape" and "letter T to right shift" :-)

I read you wrote some C for frequency analysis for letters, bigrams, trigrams. How's that going?

Regarding the National Cipher Challenge you don't actually need to prepare (there are a few introductions to ciphers on the website which covers what you need for most of the challenges) and there is a week between each challenge, so lots of time to solve each one.

The idea of the challenge is to try to get A Level students interested in a career at GCHQ or in the cyber security industry and choosing suitable subjects to study at degree level.

Writing your own analysis tools is overkill and not at all required so don't let that put you off having a go at it.

Edit: I forgot to mention I also added finding  quadgrams and quintgrams to my C program along with sorting them by the most common and displaying them next to the most common quadgrams and quintgrams.

Sounds fun too.

I may prepare next year.

Only ever heard of chi squared, not the rest.

Now it's the countdown.

(For kbd, I use Delux GM901 ot 902, I think.)

Sounds interesting, I've not done any rust programming - something to have a look at sometime.

You can get ergonomic keyboards, I've thought about getting one in the past, but the only problem is I touch type so would need to re-learn all the new letter positions - there is some info about it here: https://dygma.com/blogs/ergonomics/the-best-keyboard-layout

I've added a bit to my C program - it now includes the chi squared test, asintoer test and the Kasiski test for multi-alphabetic ciphers of up to 12 letters - I've now implemented all of the functions I think I needed for most of the national cipher challenge (last time I did it to help out my nephew by giving him hints I only used online tools).