It is a general misconception that NSA involvement made Windows Vista more secure. NSA may certainly know stuff about cryptography but they are only humans. Thus, when it came to security, they suck like everybody else. Here is a cross-site script (XSS) vulnerability at the NSA web site for a sample:
http://www.nsa.gov/notices/notic00004.cfm?Address="%20onmouseover="alert('boo')
(go to ACCEPT link at the bottom of page)
See, a plain input validation is not something that NSA great at. Do not take it for granted then.
A great UI is one that allows user to remove and hide whatever UI designers believe to be a great UI.
If you ever wanted to feel yourself like a computer virus then
Seems that anything else instead of “google” will work the same way. Humans are not supposed to browse that far, ya know.
Edited, 03-03-07: Google fixed this bug.
In case you haven’t seen this yet: there are few documents available as exhibits in the Comes v. Microsoft case at http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/. These are inside letters and memos elaborates on Microsoft’s competitive practice. Although there is nothing new and you can hardly find anything you didn’t know already, it is still an interesting reading.
Today I’ve found Sudokuza while revising my archives. This is a program that solves Sudoku puzzles. I sketched it more than a year ago for fun to avoid Sudoku mania. :) My main goal was to create a program which would solve a puzzle the similar way as a human would do, without hardcore math.
The algorithm is very simply and straightforward. Sudokuza eliminates each solved number from the variants for remaining cells within the corresponding row, column and 3×3 block. All cells with a single variant left assumed as solved. If Sudokuza cannot eliminate anything and a puzzle is not solved then it takes one of the remaining variants from the first unsolved cell as a correct answer and try to continue. And so on, until puzzle is done or given up. Sudokuza give up on a cell with zero variants left or an impossibly solved number.
Sudokuza was written in C and here is its source code – sudokuza.c. There is also a ZIP archive (34kb) which includes this code, compiled executable and few sample puzzles.
Since Sudokuza was written primarily for personal entertainment, it is not that user-friendly. It is a command-line utility that input a puzzle from a specified text file:
sudokuza.exe yourpuzzle.txt
The file format is simple – first nine characters from first nine lines form a Sudoku grid. Take a look inside ZIP archive for samples, these are easy to understand.
Have fun :)
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