The Poker Nerd

I spent a few days learning enough python to write a hand evaluator. Python’s seamless use of extremely large numbers makes some neat tricks involving prime numbers that would be tricky in languages limited to 64-bit integers extremely easy.  (more…)

No one ever warned me not to watch Lucky You. Maybe, I should have known better. There were plenty of warning signs. But, there was nothing on the DVR and it was a Sunday afternoon.

I almost got away from it. I hated the main character enough to root for Drew Barrymore not to sleep with him. That meant I thought he didn’t deserve to do as well as, say, Tom Green. But, it kept hovering back and forth over the entertaining-annoying ratio line and sucked me in.

Even if this had been a good movie up to that point, the ending would have made it a horribly bad movie. Instead, it went from mediocre to painfully bad. Everyone involved should be embarrassed.

No one ever warned me. Now, you’ve been warned.

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…)

So, some time around the holidays, my life got busy—not busy in the sense of getting a lot of things accomplished, just busy. All of my side projects got pushed farther to the side and I ended up focused on the job and the social life and what little spare time I had went to pursuits requiring a minimum of skull sweat. Playing poker, much less writing about it and programming it came to a grinding halt.

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I apologize for deleting it. Wading through 2,444 mostly-spam comments was more than I could face. So, I bulk-deleted.

As part of the relaunch, I’ll be adding reCAPTCHA to the comment page.

I used to be a web developer.

Even as I write that, I don’t believe it. For about four years during the late nineties and early naughties, I worked exclusively developing COM components for use behind ASP pages. But, when I made the jump to the dotnet universe, I also jumped back to building desktop applications. I learned the rudiments of ASP.NET back in 2001, but never used it professionally. Six years later, what I learned is both faded and obsolete.

I’ve never really accepted that I’m not a web developer anymore. This site is a perfect example of that. Currently, it’s just a blog, but I’ve always had an eye towards making it a fully-functional website with a front page, articles and everything.

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