Portland JavaScript Admirers' Monthly Meeting

The monthly meeting of Portland's first JavaScript and ECMAscript users' group. We host presentations and discussions on everything JavaScript-related - including JavaScript frameworks, node.js, CoffeeScript, and whatever else comes up.

This month we will have Paul Rogers of DingoSky (https://github.com/dingosky) presenting "What We Talk About When We Talk About Entropy."

Entropy? Who talks about entropy? Well, as developers we all do. Often without realizing it, of course. For example, suppose you need a random string. Obvious questions are: How long? And using what characters? What's less obvious is those questions are actually talking about entropy. Because when you need a random string, what you really need is a string representation of randomness, and entropy measures that randomness. We'll discuss that you don't really need a random string of 16 hex characters. What you need entropy. The string length and characters used are a by-product of that need. We'll look at entropy-string, a JavaScript package that eschews the common idea that random strings should be specified by length and focuses on generating cryptographically strong random strings of specified entropy. Along the way we'll visit the famous birthday paradox and hash collisions. But all along, we'll be talking about entropy. Come join the randomness.

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Feel free to join our mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxjs if you too are a JavaScript admirer. Or visit our web site for more information at http://pdxjs.com/ .

If you're interested in making a presentation at this or at a future meet-up, please e-mail speakatpdxjs@gmail.com .