For some recent supervision work on my Security lectures, I was given the task of decoding a string encrypted with a simple shift cipher. This cipher, given a key, simply moves each letter on in the alphabet by an amount given by the key, wrapping at the end. Being a good functional programmer, I decided to implement a brute force solver for this in Haskell, and I’m rather pleased by the terseness of the result, so I felt compelled to share it.

OK, to follow up on my last post about the quirks of XMLHTTPRequest, fuzzyman very kindly provided most of the solution I needed.

So I just spent the last 2 hours or so of my life buggering around with Ruby on Rails and trying to get it to do a RESTful login (i.e. one using HTTP Authorization headers, as opposed to the normal cookie stuff). There are some nice articles about pulling this feat off, such as here and here: the basic trick is to use XMLHTTPRequest to force the username/password from form fields into the browers authentication cache.

Welcome to the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of blog posts on research in functional programming. I see a lot of really neat papers come and go that show the great things that are happening in this design space, and I’m hoping to open their discoveries to a slightly wider audience by providing more what I hope are readable descriptions of them for people who don’t have the time to trawl through 20 pages or so. By using examples liberally I hope I can provide an alternative to the sometimes rather dry language of the abstracts. Anyway, that explained we can get on with the show!

So, last year while working at Resolver Systems I worked with the author of Movable Python, which is a fairly neat application that lets you carry Python around on a USB stick. As an intellectual exercise I reimplemented the core functions in C# with a slightly less eccentric interface (no offence meant, Michael!), but was suprised to find I had to roll my own code to setup global hotkeys to run scripts, which was a nice feature of Movable I wanted to try and add.