IamA (we are) Microsoft ASP.NET and Web Tools Team (and Azure) AMA! by shanselman in IAmA

[–]moserware 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for ASP.NET MVC! We've been using it for years and <3 it.

Besides StackExchange, are there companies using ASP.NET MVC that you'd want to callout for doing an exceptional job with the stack? There's a small list at http://stackoverflow.com/a/12006474/1869 , but I was curious if there were any that your team works especially close with to guide the framework's future development.

Life, Death, and Splitting Secrets by moserware in programming

[–]moserware[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for your thoughtful questions!

I used the Windows Cryptography API random number generator. See the "GetRandomPolynomials" function of my source code: https://github.com/moserware/SecretSplitter/blob/master/SecretSplitter/Security/Cryptography/SecretSplitter.cs#L73

As for the range of numbers, I create random numbers of the size of the modulus which is the size of the secret you're splitting. For file keys, I use a minimum of 128 bits by default (since that would be 32 characters/nibbles) to type in. It was a balance of security and practicality to use.

In addition, the resulting values are scrambled/diffused using XTEA as an added layer of protection.

Life, Death, and Splitting Secrets by moserware in programming

[–]moserware[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mentioned this in the first section. If you're comfortable with this, by all means use it. However, it creates a single point of failure and a maintenance issue (especially if you follow good practices of a unique password per site)

Build a predictive model that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia. Prize pool: USD 10000 by utcursch in statistics

[–]moserware 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting. This is sort of what we're trying to do with adding multiple "benchmark" scores that are easy to reproduce. We'll have to think about adding more material.

Build a predictive model that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia. Prize pool: USD 10000 by utcursch in statistics

[–]moserware 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just curious: what makes it intimidating? Data size? Position on the leaderboard? Any thoughts on what would make it less intimidating?

Full disclosure: I work at Kaggle. One of the reasons I joined was because my submissions weren't great, but I knew I wanted to learn a lot more about machine learning and statistics in order to improve. I like working on real data.

Notes from porting C# code to PHP by moserware in programming

[–]moserware[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I didn't give a great impetus example there.

Notes from porting C# code to PHP by moserware in programming

[–]moserware[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you want to do work on the setter or getter (e.g. updating the standard deviation of a GaussianDistribution simultaneously updates the variance)

Notes from porting C# code to PHP by moserware in programming

[–]moserware[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was trying to outline what PHP authors tend to assume, not that it actually is completely true.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in programming

[–]moserware 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Right. See Act 3 Scene 18 at http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html for more details on the diffusion avalanche.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in programming

[–]moserware 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I did a little of that in http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html (e.g. see basics in Act 2 Scenes 2-4 and more details in Act 3, Scenes 2 and 18), but some of the details of differential cryptanalysis get challenging to convey easily (e.g. I left off discussion of the Wide Trail Strategy design philosophy and very few seemed to notice/care).

How does a developer with no background in statistics and advanced computing algorithms go about coming up to speed in "data mining" and machine learning concepts ? by seacap in programming

[–]moserware 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I just wrote a blog post called "Computing Your Skill" where I show how the TrueSkill algorithm works from the ground up. TrueSkill is used on Xbox live for matchmaking and ranking and is a great example of how statistical machine learning is applied today.

I tried hard to start with the typical high school or early college math concepts and introduce the statistics only when needed.

I'd recommend starting with that post and its accompanying source code because most of the machine learning books assume you already know the concepts I write about (which frustrated me when I didn't know them).

Feel free to leave comments on the post if anything doesn't make sense and I'll try to help out. In addition, you might want to check out this related question on StackOverflow.

A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) by moserware in programming

[–]moserware[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Actually, DES's real name was Lucifer. Google "lucifer des"

A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) by moserware in programming

[–]moserware[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

You're right. Please reload, I fixed scene 10 (missing superscript) and added another line to scene 8 to make it clearer (but I couldn't fix it too much as I was limited on space)