The Poker Nerd

It seems that writing or editing WordPress posts in Google Chrome squeezes out all the whitespace and makes the post unreadable.

I apologize for the mangled posts earlier this month. They have proven non-trivial to restore. I’ll try to fix them later, but would rather not let the difficulty in fixing them keep me from producing new content.

This is a test post.

The last three posts I wrote were done in Google Chrome and lost their paragraph breaks.This post is written in Mozilla Firefox. (more…)

As reported in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, a brute-force attack exploiting MD5 “collisions” has been used to crack cyphertext generated by the MD5 hashing algorithm.The MD5 algorithm is used extensively in security systems like SSL, a protocol you use every time you go to a website that starts with “https://.” (more…)

2008 was a very fallow year for me and poker. I can’t speak for the pros, but I think this happens to just about every amateur out there from time to time.I’ve been playing poker seriously in one form or another for more than fifteen years now—Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Indian casinos, tiny card rooms, underground card rooms, home games, and online. Conservatively, I’ve logged 12,000 hours over that time, which is roughly the same as six years of a full-time job. I’ve written a prototype for an online poker server and cobbled together a few klocs of other, less ready-for-prime-time code. Last year, it just all seemed to grind to a halt. (more…)

I think, if I wrote a blog just about online poker, that’s what I would call it—mostly because that’s about the only thing I say while playing that is suitable for print. (more…)