Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous

Why is Card Counting a Terrible Idea?

For the uninitiated, blackjack is a card game commonly played at casinos. Most blackjack players try to employ basic strategy in order to minimize their losses, which are typically anywhere between .3-2% of each bet. Typically you can play 50 hands/hour and you need to bet at least $5/hand, so that means that if you were to play without any deviations from basic strategy, in the long run you would lose between $1.50/hr and $10/hr.

Basic strategy only takes the cards on the table into account. There are advanced strategies that take every card that has been played into account. For example, if a lot of small cards have been played, but very few large cards have been played, it follows that a lot of large cards and only a few small cards remain. Card counting is a technique that looks at the cards that have been played in order to predict the cards that haven’t been played yet, and this information can give the player an advantage.

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Miscellaneous

Customizing WordPress

This will not be a terribly interesting blog post, but I made a number of customizations to WordPress, which I am going to document in case I ever need to install WordPress again. Maybe even someone else will stumble upon this and find this information useful.

In some cases I’ll be vague about what I did, and this is intentional. Obviously security through obscurity is a flawed practice, but at the same time, given the security track record of WordPress, I don’t want to share too much, as I don’t want to make an attacker’s life any easier than it already is.
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Miscellaneous

Hello, world!

Periodically I go through phases where I feel it would be worthwhile to have some sort of online presence, and as you have probably inferred, I am going through one of those phases again. In the past, I have hacked together a minimalistic blog/CMS in PHP or something, but this time I decided writing a good, secure, production-quality blog/CMS would require more time than I am willing to invest. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I have installed WordPress. It’s not perfect, but so far it looks like it meets my requirements. I should be able to use this site as both a personal blog and also as a platform to share various projects of mine. Stay tuned.