When the keys on my HP-49g+ finally died, I looked around a bit, and bought an HP-50g.

I expect it'll be the last calculator I ever buy.

My next purchase is more likely to be something like a netbook running Ubuntu and Octave.

I gave up on multi-boot installations a number of years, ago. I've had my last couple of PCs configured with swappable drive bays. When I want to boot a different OS, I just stick in a different drive.

Don't focus too much on programming languages. That's only the half of it.

There are a fair number of tools that professional programmers use as much as their language, and that are as or more important to doing what is without a doubt the programmer's primary task - finding out why some piece of code isn't working.

A good editor, a good build system, a decent debugger, a solid testing framework, all of these are essential to be productive.

But first, foremost, and always, version control. Don't do anything until you have version control in place. It's critical for professional programming, but it's even more critical when you're learning.

When you're working with a new technology, most of what you are doing is experimenting. Version control gives you the freedom to experiment. The confidence to try something different, knowing you can revert back to an earlier revision, if it doesn't work.

Dropping 'h's is a significant characteristic of the Cockney accent.

And to a Yank, of course, the only two British accents are BBC and Cockney.

(I saw a production of The Pirates of Penzance, once, where the constabulary used Cockney. The idea that the lower classes from Devonshire and Cornwall might have different accents than those from London's East End never seems to have occurred to them. But then, most Yanks think that the Beetles had Cockney accents. Gads!)

Or not!

I was reading David Kahn's "The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail" - his biography of Herbert Yardley. In 1941, Yardley was working with the Canadian government, helping them set up a crypto bureau. Most of what they were cracking were messages to German spies working in South America - and yes, they really were using a simple transposition cipher, just like had been appearing in puzzle books for decades.

I've posted it over there, I'll post it here.

Read section 12-3 of FM 34-40-2:

http://www.umich.edu/~umich/fm-34-40-2/ch12.pdf

This technique of solving incomplete columnar transposition ciphers had been described in the open literature prior to 1941.

It was described in Helen Gaines' "Elementary Cryptanalysis", published in 1939. Many of the techniques in Gaines' book originated in M.E. Ohaver's column "Solving Cipher Secrets", in "Flynn's Weekly Detective Fiction" magazine, which ran from 1924 to 1928. I'd not be at all surprised to find that this technique was described there.

It's beyond the realm of possibility that any German intelligence agency would have been using single transposition in 1941. It's not at all impossible to believe that someone at the FBI, asked to create a worksheet for a Life photo-op that didn't reveal anything of substance, would choose to demonstrate the cryptanalysis of a cipher that was already widely-known among the well-informed amateurs. and hence wouldn't compromise any of the systems the Germans were actually using, or how effective they were at breaking them.

Yep.

The worksheet shows the cryptanalysis of a simple transposition cipher using a technique that was included in Helen Gaines' "Elementary Cryptanalysis", published in 1939.

Whether it was ever a secure cipher I can't say. But by the late 30's, it was appearing in the advanced puzzle magazines.

Monster Grendel's tastes were plainish
      Breakfast just a couple Danish...

(Maurice Sagoff)