A security challenge for you
I watched season 1 of Cursed on Netflix.
I didn’t link to the show because I don’t want to be responsible if any of you watch it. It’s not good. It’s not even a “guilty pleasure”. Speaking of which, guilt is when you have regrets, but no one who describes a TV show as a guilty pleasure actually regrets watching it. It would be more accurate to call it an embarrassing pleasure.
Anyway, the point is that I watched Cursed and I actually do regret it. If you want to watch a Netflix show about a reluctant teenage girl overcoming evil Christians with the help of a magic piece of metal, you should watch Warrior Nun. See? I linked to that one.
But one good thing did come out of watching Cursed! The main character in that show is named Nimue, which is pronounced “nim way”. I’m sure this is what influenced me to finally take a look at the programming language Nim last week and to use it to build a miniature Capture the Flag for you.
That brings me to this week’s homework—sorry if you didn’t realize this newsletter would involve homework—do my Capture the Flag challenge! No one has solved it yet, so you can be the first. Please email me if you want hints. You don’t need to know anything about Nim to solve it. In fact, I had a Go version ready to ship before I decided to do things the Nim way instead.
Here are the blog posts I wrote this past week:
Smart Contracts Are Stored Procedures – This is the most boring but also most useful way to understand what smart contracts are.
HashCache Capture the Flag Challenge – I just told you about this. Go do it.
Visualizing Statistics With Dynamic Ranges – This is sort of about data visualization and a little about CSS. It’s hard to describe.
And here’s an article I didn’t write but did enjoy reading. You could call it a guiltless pleasure:
P.S. The next newsletter will very likely include pictures of kittens we’re fostering. I’ll make it relevant somehow, like maybe I’ll write a blog post called “Extension Methods in Dart: Introducing DateTime.meow()”. Whatever. I have a week(ish) to figure it out.