Introducing the Dayada Encoding

2023-12-01 5 min read Programming marco

Imagine you need to transfer small chunks of binary data over a channel that doesn’t like binary of any kind. You want to disguise it as regular text, maybe in a language the text processor/forwarder cannot analyze. That’s exactly what the Dayada encoding does. Continue reading

Adding Search to a HUGO Site

2023-11-11 10 min read Site Programming marco

One function that is harder to do without a database backend, as static sites don’t, is search. With WordPress, search is baked into the core and all templates have to do is not get in the way. But on a static site, there is no backend to call, no infrastructure to invoke, and no user interface to show. Static sites have gotten around this by using third party search providers. Basically, you add some third party code to your site and then magic happens. Continue reading

How I Became the World's Best Wordle Player

2022-02-07 10 min read Programming marco

Wordle 233 1/6 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 The world is gripped by a new game: Wordle, which is an odd and addictive combination of a word guessing game with MasterMind, a game involving color created in 1970. You have six tries to guess a five letter word, and for each guess you get in reply which letters of your word are correct, which ones would be correct in a different location, and which ones are plain wrong. Continue reading

Threshold Chunking

2021-02-05 15 min read Programming marco

The Problem How do you distribute a file in pieces such that you need exactly a given number of the pieces to rebuild the entire file? This article was inspired by the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a cryptographic scheme (process) by which a secret key is shared between $n$ fragments, any $m$ of which can be used to recreate the entire key (n and $m$ being determined at the beginning of the process). Continue reading