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Hello Hackers-
Thanks to Facebook NYC for hosting us! I always give Facebook a lot of crap, but they were very gracious hosts and even invited us back!
Implement RC4 in your favorite language. It's not incredibly complicated, and it has many known weaknesses, but it's a fun exercise in crytographic meanderings. Then, you should of course share it on the list.
(See my implementation in Guile Scheme. It took 27 minutes to write and debug (at 5:30 in the morning). See? Quick.)
Jay hates GMail and most webmail clients, but is attempting to rectify that situation with Hipflask, an MUA over the web that can connect to multiple IMAP accounts.
[ I'm very excited about this and would love to have the free time to help out. If you have some free time and hate your mail situation please, please, contribute! -- ed]
Bjorne wrote a basic command line guitar tuner so you can be even more nerdy when playing ukelele[0]. We were then treated to an impromptu concert, in which the singer was a little flat...
[ Round 19 was Jay's first Hack and Tell, and was very excited about presenting--he submitted 3 proposals! He got the chance to talk again after bad weather made a presenter cancel. Thanks Jay -- ed]
For Jay's second act, he showed us his version of most people's shoddy management of resumes. The punchline is bootstrap, and the setup is JSON. The climax though, is a very useful tool that could save many people a lot of frustration when writing a resume.
Zach showed us how he won a game of golf by implementing K-Means clustering in Arc. Not discussed is how K really means jibberish.
Moses showed us how he used parser combinators in Scala to create an argument parsing library that doesn't suck so bad.
[ What apartment did the pirate live in? 2RRRRRRRRRRRRRR! -- ed]
Aditya is a data guy, and he and a few friends hacked together a way to collect real time sentiment on the presidential debates. [ Personally, it'd be more interesting to see it hooked up to someone undergoing Ludovico therapy -- ed]
Conway's Game of Life, in Erlang (where each cell is a process!), awk and in OCaml.
Roman shared with us his ventures into building Chrome Apps, which I guess you could consider Google's take on XUL? His first attempt, a full blown IRC client.
We've got two potential spaces lined up, so look for us again right before the holiday rush!
I don't get much time to read the web these days, so I've been relying more and more on a weekly mailing list called Coder Weekly. It gets sent every weekend and has a good mix of interesting articles.
Until next time!
Happy Hacking,
Andrew and James
[0]: Oh just kidding. I too have a ukelele, though I have no musical talent. On my ever long list of things to do is to learn to play punk rock covers on it.