Pensoj de Paŭlo

Every once in a while I stumble about a tag on Stack Overflow which

has no useful meaning; or

is a marker for questions which are generally off-topic or not constructive.

Sometimes I try to open a post on Meta Stack Overflow about these to collect some help to clean them up. But as each user has only a limited amount of close-votes (and you need five votes from different users (or one from a moderator) to close a question), one can do that only every so often, these questions would take votes away from each other.

So here I'll try to have a list of these tags so I don't forget.

[future]: A lot of these are questions about future events. Prophesies are not on-topic on SO.. The on-topic meaning would be the concept used in concurrent programming.

[protected]: About quite some different things, like the protected keyword in some programming languages, protected memory, protected Twitter accounts, password-protected files, protecting video downloads, ... . I'm not sure how to sensibly retag this. (The tag also has no tag wiki.)

[alternative]: This looks like another tag which contains many non-constructive questions.

[documents]

[word] vs. [msword]

Die "Ing-DiBa" Bank hat gerade eine Kampagne laufen, bei der an 1000 Vereine für gemeinnützige Projekte je 1000 Euro verteilt werden.

Einer der Kandidaten ist der Deutsche Esperanto-Bund, welcher damit Reisekosten von ausländischen Teilnehmern zu Esperanto-Treffen in Deutschland bezuschussen will.

Um dafür ausgewählt zu werden, müssen viele Leute dafür stimmen. Dazu muss man auf der Webseite der Ing-DiBa seine E-Mail-Adresse eingeben (und noch ein Captcha lösen, um zu zeigen, dass man nicht blind ist), und dann in dem in der erhaltenen E-Mail enthaltenen Link seine Stimme bestätigen.

The standard answer to embedding source code listings in a LaTeX document is the listings package. It works in pure LaTeX, by parsing the source code and highlighting some parts of them.

An alternative I just found on Stack Overflow is the minted package, created by Konrad Rudolph. It uses the Pygments library to do the actual parsing and highlighting.

It shows that each of my seven browsers here has a unique fingerprint.

By Jeff Moser, this is a guide in stick-figure-comic form, which explains how AES came to be, how the AES cryptography works, and also some of the math behind it.

It also mentions "Confusion" and "Diffusion", the important principles in Cryptographic algorithms.

Just half an hour ago, the new Cryptography Stack Exchange site transitioned from private beta to public beta.

The original private beta period was extended because of not enough questions. Now we have 70 questions, 152 answers (and only two questions without any answers at all, apart from some ones closed as off-topic).

If you ever had a cryptographic question, ask it now. You don't even need to get an account.

These were my questions (in reverse chronological order, and at the same time in vote number order):

Guarding against cryptanalytic breakthroughs: combining multiple hash functions

bcrypt: can one efficiently iterate valid hash output values?

Some study seems to show that lower-IQ users tend to use more Internet Explorer (and even more older IE versions), while higher-IQ ones tend to use Opera and Camino (and IE with Chrome Frame). Firefox, Safari and Chrome are preferred by the "middle" bunch.

Is this really so? (I'm using Opera, by the way.)

399 Wörter

Speedtest

Ein Transportformat für XML (bzw. genauer: für die selben Daten, die man auch mit XML übertragen kann), aber deutlich kompakter.

Some hours ago (at 18:38 UTC, to be precise), the new Stack Exchange site about Cryptography entered the private beta phase.

Now, three hours later, there are already 16 questions, of which most (all but one) received some answers, and 4 answers are even accepted (one of those being one of my two answers, which consisted mainly of a link I posted here before, with some additional sentences.)

This looks good for a start on this complex topic.

After one week, the site will go public (and then I'll add the link here). (Update (2011-07-19): The private beta will be a bit longer, since there are not really much questions yet.)