Ok, Let's give this a try

I've been thinking about blogging for about 6 months now but didn't know what to write about. I tend not to spend time on hobbies...I'm just too busy. I wanted to write something that might be useful to people other than myself.

Well, cryptography has been a passion of mine for the past couple of decades. I've worked in the field, read articles for fun, read about older ciphers. It's not everyone's cup of tea. Most people believe Crypto is HARD. So what I'd like to do is try to disprove this complaint. As I get time, I plan on writing about all sorts of things related to ciphers, secret communication, etc. Stuff from the earliest character based ciphers up to current strong encryption and public key infrastructures (oh, err... certificates). It might take a while to get to those more advanced topics. I'll try to make these entries interesting, understandable, and fun. We'll see where it goes.

Here are a couple of books I've enjoyed about cryptography. These are not heavily technical. Both are more about the history of ciphers than the technology.

"Crypto" by Steven Levy
http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/other-books/crypto

"The Code Book" by Simon Singh
http://www.simonsingh.net/The_Code_Book.html

The latter has some technical information but still focuses on history.

Enjoy.