Smart cards

I spent most of the workday in a seminar on "Smart cards." Here are some of the things I found out:

• I get bored listening to someone talk about vaguely technical material which I could have learned faster by reading a short manual.

• Denmark is trying to implement a stored-value card aka cash card which has no microprocessor-based security. I had the immediate impulse to catch the next plane for Copenhagen and start trying to hack it. "Never steal anything small."

• While sitting in a darkened room, I like to fantasize about cutting people's throats. Not the lecturer's, nor anyone I particularly disliked; apparently I don't have to have any grudge against them.

• I also like to fantasize about sadistic or kinky sex. (But you knew that.)

• Both of the preceding activities are substantially more interesting than listening to facts about smart cards.

• Despite the time I was spending on such fantasies, I was still able to ask more intelligent technical questions than the other participants. The answers to all of the ones I was really interested in were put off until tomorrow's session.

• The ISO spec for the smart card electrical interface is incredibly stupid, because it was written by a standards committee that didn't want to disallow anything that any card maker might be doing or might eventually want to do. Thus the card can demand the reader supply a Vcc of anywhere from 5V to 25V in increments of 0.1V with 2% accuracy.

• I gazed at the speaker's telescoping pointer. I would like something like that; very whippy and light weight, but with a razor edge along both sides of its length. I am very fond of the katana, but at that moment I was feeling that I wanted something lighter, like a very strong sharpened fencing foil but collapsible.

• The speaker was French -- Gilles, which made me think of Gilles du Rais. His English was excellent, though he once or twice said "oot" for "out". He would sometimes substitute an odd mistranslation for some technical word -- "recurrent" for "recursive", "design" for "designate", etc. My favorite was "parasite on the power supply", meaning "power glitch".

• When I think of parasites on the electrical power, I think of weird translucent glowing creatures, feeding on the energy and growing, changing forms and spreading from one system to another. Complete ad lib.

• Gilles quoted Eric S. Raymond's comments on standards, which was medium cool.

• I wanted to bite the neck and shoulders of the woman sitting diagonally in front of me, who I am quite fond of. To bite them until I tasted her blood.

• The design of the smart cards was depressingly similar in many respects to the microprocessor-based RAM card I had to implement and design extensions to, three years ago, which was one of my least favorite programming projects of the last decade, primarily due to the shoddy original design I inherited and the poor qualities of the Z8 processor.

• I am in a morbid mood today. It really is a good thing I have a modicum of self-restraint. Also that I respond sexually to and with gentleness as strongly as to morbidity.

-- C

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