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Gnu Privacy Guard

Would you send a letter to a friend without an envelope, even if the contents weren't super secret? Probably not, so why do you send email across the country or across the world in clear text so anyone with his ear to the wire can read it? Sending encrypted email is easy, and kind of fun :). Take a look at www.gnupg.org if you're interested in learning more about public key cryptography and how to encrypt your own email. gpg also interfaces beautifully with mutt (so this is yet another reason to stop using pine to read your email!) You can get my public key from online keyservers such as pgp.mit.edu, or from this web page. Just to tick the feds off a little more, slap a header like the one below on your email. This is random output from a little perl script I wrote that takes advantage of a fun emacs macro (M-x spook), and will change each time you hit this page.

X-NSA: Can't open perl script "/home/steve/spook.pl": No such file or directory

Scrabble

I'm a sucker for statistics, and Jess and I play a fair bit of scrabble, so I started keeping numbers from all our scrabble games. I have more detailed data than what is up right now, but haven't figured out a good data model for storing, analyzing, and displaying it yet. Anyway, you can see all the scores of our games since I started keeping them, and a few records, here

Dictionaries

Recently I've had some interest in manipulating words with perl scripts for various (useless) reasons. The world needs more machine readable dictionaries, I feel. Here are two that I found useful:

ospd.txt or (in zip format) ospd.zip: A machine readable list of legal scrabble words, current through the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 3rd edition. Very useful to have in digital form if you want to get sophisticated with your questions about sets of legal words (ie, what is the longest scrabble word with no vowels?)

ascii-1054.tar.gz: A machine readable version of the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English. This archive contains several files, and only one that I used, but I figured I should redistribute it in it's full form. For you non-unix types, WinZip should handle the .tar.gz file type ok. This dictionary was especially useful for me because it has around 70,000 words with syllable counts, as well as other information including the form of the word and the part of speach. You can do a lot with this dictionary if you want to get creative. It was assembled by Roger Mitton, a computer scientist at Birkbeck College in London, and is also available at the Oxford Text Archive.

Nethack

Nethack is a wonderful text based dungeon crawl based on D&D that has sucked up way too much of my time. It's far deeper than you would expect for this type of game. You can download it for your own computer at www.nethack.org or, if you're lucky, you have a shell account on a server where many people play. It gets boring if the only ghost you ever encounter is your own. Here is the current high score list for wso.williams.edu (where I used to play) and here is the list for njord.org.