The “imagen” utility included with Hevea, a LaTeX to HTML translator, suffers from a subtle bug in combination with certain versions of of Ghostscript and ImageMagick, where the output of the former (a bitmap image) is pumped into the latter (for trimming / resizing) via a Unix pipe. For buffer-related reasons which ultimately remain a […]

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFC. This is the heaviest revision of the spec to date, approaching a total rewrite. Pedantic details concerning data types and their encodings were added; several algorithms have been reworked and substantially simplified; and a number of ugly gaffes — corrected. There is a pretty-printed mirror of this […]

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFD. There are currently two published prototype implementations of Pest: “Blatta” (by thimbronion); and “smalpest” (by jonsykkel). Thank you, prototype implementers! A quite lively Pestnet is now active, and a public log thereof, operated by billymg (WOT) may be seen here. There is a working draft of v. […]

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFE. There is a pretty-printed mirror of this page. There is now a prototype! (Thank you, thimbronion!) 14 Dec 2021: And there is now a second prototype! (Thank you, jonsykkel!) There is a working draft of v. 0xFC. (Note: it may change without warning!) The document (very much […]

This is a continuation of “Pest” v. 0xFF. Edit: A note for the innocent — this series of articles concerns an algorithm! It is not, at the time of writing, fully implemented anywhere! There is now a prototype! (Thank you, thimbronion!) Or even entirely complete. Edit: There is a working draft of v. 0xFD. (Note: […]

What follows is a long-promised detailed specification of a DDOS-proof, CPU-inexpensive, ciphered-authenticated peer-to-peer communication protocol. I would like to thank Thimbronion for implementing a large subset of this spec already despite not having seen it yet! The document (very much a work in progress!) is available as a vtree. You will need: A V-tron. If […]

Recently, I received a tip that some Linux users saw rubbish in place of certain Unicode glyphs appearing in the FFA series (in particular, in Ch. 14.) If the following two rows of symbols do not appear recognizably-identical in your WWW browser: ← → ⇠ ⇢ ⌊ ⌋ … the following fix is likely to […]

This article is part of a series of hands-on tutorials introducing FFA, or the Finite Field Arithmetic library. FFA differs from the typical "Open Sores" abomination, in that -- rather than trusting the author blindly with their lives -- prospective users are expected to read and fully understand every single line. In exactly the same […]

This article is part of a series of hands-on tutorials introducing FFA, or the Finite Field Arithmetic library. FFA differs from the typical “Open Sores” abomination, in that — rather than trusting the author blindly with their lives — prospective users are expected to read and fully understand every single line. In exactly the same […]

This article is part of a series of hands-on tutorials introducing FFA, or the Finite Field Arithmetic library. FFA differs from the typical “Open Sores” abomination, in that — rather than trusting the author blindly with their lives — prospective users are expected to read and fully understand every single line. In exactly the same […]