tl;dr: a lot of things happened this year! So, here is a bunch of interesting stuff I discovered which must earn an award and remembered!
Well, another year is almost over of which idea kindly1 pushes me to both leave a post for future reference and to get a self-reflection moment!
I enjoy a lot my cryptography consultant job! Everyday something new, a lot of problem-solving and much, much things to learn! Sadly, I cannot really talk about what I do openly, but there is major project that went public: Palliora. Take a look at the white-paper!
Despite leaving academia, my academic output is definitely not dead: five papers accepted/published, editor of a conference’s proceedings, help with PhD mentoring, ten-ish reviewed papers. That is arguably something, considering I’m now have a independent consultancy position, not an academic one!2
With that melancholic thought out of my mind and relegated to the footnotes, I think we both deserve to break from our rat-races with some well deserved (personal) awards for little stuff I discovered during the year.
Why? For you to maybe discover something new and because I kinda did something like that last year, so made sense to repeat it this year!
For the first category of the year, I want to start with an elegnat algorith from Bill Gosper and published in HAKMEM.
unsigned nexthi_same_count_ones(unsigned a) {
/* works for any word length */
unsigned c = (a & -a);
unsigned r = a+c;
return (((r ^ a) >> 2) / c) | r);
}This algorithm gives you the next integer that has the same Hamming weight, or the same amount of ones in binary representation. What makes this algorithm amazing is the fact that it only uses binary/arithmetic operation making it really fast (as I show here)
Of course, if you fancy less theoretical algorithm, Ciju’s blogpost is a pleasant read on Excel/Google Sheets most relavant (I would say) financial functions, aka the functions describing mortgages/loan 😅. I was aware the these spreadsheet framework had a lot of functionalities but I never took the time to figure out what was there!
My second category is all about terminal applications and tricks. As usual, there are so many to share but I will limit myself to a (overly) specific workflow that many (cryptography) researcher find themselves into.
For the unaware, Cryptobib is a curated BibTeX database for cryptographic references which distinguished encoding of the label: these are basically the venue/journal, the authors initials and the year. If the publishing venue, authors are known, the encoding is really easy to build.
However, if you do not know all the information (which happens way more often that one can imagine) there is a small problem: searching for the reference in a 30+ MB of file is not fast.
For this reason, I would suggest you to use citerus, a beautiful companion tool that allows you to search the CryptoBib database, both via title and/or authors!
The third category touches future proects of mine, or at least, projects that I would like to do and investigate in my spare time!
Last year, I throw there the idea of FlyESP, a traveling companion device and… ehm… let’s say that I at least have some developing hardware but that is pretty much it 😅
There are some small projects in pipeline: for example I will for sure develop a trail-computing framework for differential cryptanalysis.
On the other hand I would like to create a reviewer mini-app to simplify my PDF reviewing process (and maybe help others). Currently, when I review, I keep both PDF and text-editor open so to allow me to highlight and write short notes in the PDF and deveop the review in the text-editor. One problem I have is that the PDF annotation are really hard to version-control or quickly edit using a text-editor. Additionally, many PDF reader have too many features.
I would like to at least have a cleaner interface on the PDF and insert notes that are stored3 in a human-readable/editable format. On top of that, it would make notes version-controllable meaning they can go on a repo and be shared with others simplifying the reviewing experience between multi-reviewers.
For my final category, I will award the YouTubers that I enjoyed following this year!
First of all, Bread on Penguins has a magnificent way of presenting both her linux-oriented content (I suggest watching this video) and more human-oriented topics (like the shared need to slow down and take a breath).
Second award goes to Another Roof which is a math-oriented channel that has amazing visualization and explanations. I highly recommend you to watch his post-quantum cryptography mini-series (of which I love the quantum Fourier transform visualization presented here).
Last channel award goes to Fern and their always improving quality. Oh my, every video is a joy to watch and the topics are always fascinating!
On a completely different tone, I want to share this documentary on “The New Aesthetics of Fascism” from Ben Hoerman that touches on profound topics which are current, real and important to remember.
Oh my, what a journey! I had other nominees such as using typst that I would like to start using for quick (math/crypto/research) notes and for document creation or my slow process of moving all my writing/coding habits to neovim. Fair, these are still work-in-progress so maybe they will win an award in the next years!
Thank you for reading. Wish you a nice winter break and see you in the next year!
well… I wanted to write more often but finding the time is (as always) not easy! ↩
What surprises me is how the past academic experiences still hijack my brain’s rewarding-mechanism and convince me that “all of this is nothing special”. Someone on LinkedIn (I don’t recall who) was pointing out that academia cannot be a “just-a-job” because the real mantra in these environments is “drive-is-key” which is… fair, real but sad? Drive and motivation are important, sure, but I believe that anyone with infinite time and resources can be an academic rockstar. The real challenge is being good while still have the time to enjoy life! ↩
Skim allow to save the notes on an external file. However these have a overly compressed format and I have not spent more than 5 minutes to figure out these notes format. ↩