Hello everyone!

Today I’m excited to announce that I’m changing my position and moving to a great team at PKI Solutions starting with July 1!

As you may know, I recently was graduated as bachelor in computer science and it is a great time to make another step forward. I wanted to progress in PKI area as even stronger specialist. Unfortunately, there is no PKI market here in Latvia (where I’m living) and had two options: become another regular software developer here in Latvia or find opportunities outside of my country. I was looking for a not very big team where I could develop myself and (it is very important) where the team can benefit from my knowledge and experience. While looking for job opportunities I realised that I’m not fitting good many positions, because either, overqualified or underqualified for particular position.

I heard about Mark “The PKI Guy” Cooper from his years at Microsoft and knew him as a world-class PKI specialist. Mark is a president of PKI Solutions, they offer PKI consulting services and run PKI training. I didn’t see myself there, because PKI Solutions is US-based and relocation to US isn’t an option for me, but pinged him anyway, maybe he could have options in EU. Otherwise, PKI Solutions is a perfect place where both parties can benefit: I can continue my self-development in the area and the company gets a strong knowledge and experience in programming with PKI. Surprisingly, Mark showed a high interest in my work and heritage and made an offer which doesn’t require relocation.

During the negotiation of the deal, Mark showed himself as an awesome man with a clear vision of his business’ needs and how I can fill certain gaps to make the PKI Solutions a solid all-around team where each piece consists of strong specialists in particular areas. In addition, Mark expressed a wish to continue the support of all my public work: blogging, technical forums and open-source projects. These days community is vital for IT market, you have to support the community and you will get paid back eventually. And I will play an integral role in making the PKI Solutions a more community-oriented company though knowledge sharing.

Along the personal move I’m moving my public projects to PKI Solutions as well, because we will build new tools on top of existing frameworks. These tools are moved:

• PowerShell PKI module
• pkix.net library
• ASN.1 Editor and ASN parser library
• SSL Certificate Verifier

I will continue these tools development as open-source projects. Nothing will change to existing users, it is only brand change.

As a PKI Solutions employee I will continue blogging about PKI and CryptoAPI at https://www.pkisolutions.com/author/crypt32/. I will continue to maintain this blog in future so no existing link will break, but all new PKI-related posts will go to new blog.

Hello blog readers!

Here is another tl;dr; blog post! Yesterday I completed my winter exam session at university and want to recall one interesting work I had year ago at the course called “Data structures and algorithms” where we learned various data structures and manipulation algorithms. During the course we developed them in programming languages with further analysis. In array search class work I had to implement, analyze and compare two search methods: sentinel search and hash table search.

Most search algorithms have complexity. This means that their performance depends on array size. Larger is array, more time is required to find element in array. There is binary search that gives which better than linear, but still depends on array size and requires sorted array. Binary search is impossible for unsorted arrays. What next? Next is search algorithm that would give us constant complexity. This means that regardless of array size, search will be completed in constant time. This algorithm (actually, data structure) is hash table.

What is hash table? It is an associative array that maps keys to data values. Unlike classic arrays, there is no such term as array index, instead there used term key value. Key is an identification information about data value. During class work I learned a lot about hash tables and faced a number of very interesting challenges while attempting to develop a reliable implementation of hash table. And this blog post will reveal all of them!

I’m glad to announce that today I switched my website to SSL. This greatly increases security for my visitors, because all your data on this website is protected.

I made a soft-permanent redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. This means that all previous links to my website will continue to work, but with redirect. In any way, I encourage everyone who have links to my website to update them by changing protocol identifier.

Please, let me know if you face any SSL-related issues when browsing my website, either, in the post comments, or by contacting me via contact form.

And the last word: many thanks to DigiCert as they kindly offered me SSL certificate. I’m using their services for several years and would say that it is really 5-star service with outstanding support lelvel and which is easy to use.

Finally I did it! I burned my old SharePoint blog and R.I.P.?ed my former Russian blog (DasBlog) as promised.

The problem

Just to recall the history. Several years ago I realized that I need a new website/portal to host my stuff. Initially I looked for a ready solution that would match my humble requirements:

1. It should support hierarchical site directories to organize content;
2. It should support SQL database;
3. It should support multi-level hierarchical content categories;
4. It should support an ability to control rendering;
5. It should support old URLs and redirect to migrated cont...

Today I want to break my own rule (no more than 1 post per day). Today I want to announce two news:

Twitter

It’s a shame, but starting by March 3, 2015, I become a member of Twitter sect. My the only official account is @Crypt32. The purpose of this account is to promote my weblog, my open projects, talk about PKI-related and other topics I’m interesting in a twitter form.

Twitter: @Crypt32