In order to factor (relatively) large semi-primes (i.e. semi-primes larger than 150-bits), you should (probably) just ask YAFU (Yet Another Factoring Utility, https://github.com/DarkenCode/yafu) to try to factor the number for you in parallel using a highly-optimized number field sieve such as GGNFS (GPL General Number Field Sieve) or SIQS (Self-Initialising Quadratic Sieve). By using YAFU I was able to factor a 302-bit semi-prime in a little over half an hour , as opposed to over the course of 72 minutes using Sage’s Quadratic Sieve (QS).

Coordinate transformation between WGS84 and the coordinate system used in Austria. The blog contains other interesting articles.

Papers & projects on developing secure software, free / libre / open source software (OSS/FLOSS), software innovation, & other interesting things...

Some time ago I came across yet another angry discussion[1] about systemd, and have been reading and thinking a great deal about the design of Systemd, and what it says about Linux. I’ve come to realize that the strife in the Linux community is because an active and well-funded group of developers who have been driving the direction of various core components are not building UNIX.

Kobuk ist ein Medienwatchblog von Studierenden der Lehrveranstaltung „Multimedia-Journalismus“ am Publizistikinstitut der Uni Wien, unter der Leitung von Helge Fahrnberger und Yilmaz Gülüm, sowie ständiger Autoren wie Hans Kirchmeyr.

The Mathematics and Computation blog focuses on connections between mathematics and the theory of computation. The blog is owned and written by Andrej Bauer, with occasional guest posts.

Endless Parentheses is a blog about Emacs. It features concise posts on improving your productivity and making Emacs life easier in general.

Blog of the privacy activist Simon Davies.

This is the first half of a two-part blog post that is motivated-by and mostly "about" two software ecosystems I've been poking around at recently. The first (and subject of this post) is I'll roughly call "interactive scientific Python", which includes primarily SciPy/SymPy/NumPy, IPython, and Sage; the second (subject of next post) is a new interactive scientific language Julia, which has a lot of complicated and subtle relationships with the former. If you hate Python, skip this post because it is really just background for why I care about the fate of a few Python packages.
Bookmarked Sun Nov 23 12:23:56 2014

"not rocket science" (the story of monotone and bors) http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/1597.html
Interesting story about continuous integration and the beginnings of distributed version control.
Bookmarked Sun Nov 23 11:59:01 2014

Blog about Programming, Theory, and Math, written by John Meacham.