Australian Signals Directorate 50c Coin Decryption

Updated: 2022-09-04

I took a very long time to post about the last Australian Signals Directorate (then DSD) decryption, so this time I’ll be a lot more punctual. This article was published today announcing that ASD have collaborated to release a new 50c coin containing a decryption challenge.

The new ASD 50c coin

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rstats 

Codegolfing Minecraft Lighting

I occasionally like to participate in an odd sport known as ‘code golf’ where the aim is to write some code to achieve a given task using the smallest number of characters.

The tradtional way to cheat at golf is to lower your score

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rstats 

Adventures in x86 ASM with rx86

I just finished ‘Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software’ by Charles Petzold which was a really well-written (in my opinion) guided journey from flashing a light in morse code through to building a whole computer, and everything needed along the way.

The section on encoding instructions for the processor (built up from logic gates) - assembly instructions as a human readable version of the machine code - was particularly interesting to me, and as I was describing this to a colleague I remembered that it’s not the first time I’ve played with assembly…

x86 assembly instructions

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Improving a Visualization

I saw this post on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful showing this plot of streaming services market share, comparing 2020 to 2021

US Streaming Services Market Share, 2020 vs 2021

and thought it looked like a good candidate for trying out some plot improvement techniques.

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rstats 

isEven without modulo

You may have seen the memes going around about fun ways to program the straightforward function isEven() which returns TRUE if the input is even, and FALSE otherwise. I had a play with this and it turned into enough for a blog post, and a nice walk through some features of R.

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rstats