Andrew Chau's Scylla

Scylla [Version 0.93b]
Last revised on 25-03-2012
System status...OK
Boot time: calculating

Welcome to Andrew Chau's Scylla!

Scylla in short is a self-coded portal containing some of my developments as well as a variety of other shared material. This includes a number of web services & tools I have programmed, multimedia, software, and other useful or entertaining content.

Unlike most other websites, I have created Scylla in a very systematic way. Each part of the site is modular making use of an abundant of functions, classes, abstracts, and other real programming methodologies such as DOM. The portal itself processes numerous files and resources into one document (what you are seeing right now). Each application I have developed is attached separately and this portal ultimately searches for them to link you over. This approach allows me to add new programs easier and not have a cluster of unrelated programs stacked together.

You may have also noticed my music player in the panel near the bottom of your screen. The songs being played are in fact being streamed from YouTube so I am not hosting any illegal music. What I did do is refactor YouTube's mechanisms (with the help of their API) to design a completely new player and engine buffering whatever songs I desire.

The name Scylla actually derives from a sea monster in Greek mythology, but the true inspiration which led me to choose this name is from the drama Prison Break. Unfortunately this isn't quite the same as the Scylla encoding revolutionary technologies many of you have seen in the series. I initially had my idea of this portal back in 2009 but progress often stalled due to there always being something sidetracking me. Hence after changing my mind a number of times on what I wanted Scylla to be, what you currently see is very much the final product. Do let me know however if you have any comments or suggestions.

Scylla, including all its attached programs are closed-source and coded entirely by me.

Andrew's Guides

Views on Motorcycling
Released on 30/1/2012
Andrew's first hand views on riding a motorbike. Whether you are already a rider, planning on getting a motorcycle, or just interested in them, I am sure you will find some of the points I mention here to be of your interest.
Length of guide: long

Andrew's Applications

Advanced Encryption Standard
Latest version 3.1 released on 28/12/2011
This application I have coded encrypts plaintext of any size using the Rijndael algorithm. The symmetric key used for the encryption process must be the same when decrypting the ciphertext. This program is one of the longest I've worked on as it was done from scratch with no help from cryptology libraries. Below is a quick summary of how I implemented the algorithm. Note that you may check the debug console to see the changes in each block after every step. 1. Do an expansion schedule on user's key to another 10 sub/round keys * Perform steps 2-4 for every 128 bit block of plaintext: 2. Add Round Key * Perform step 3 ni...

Chinese Character Dictionary
Latest version 1.03 released on 16/11/2011
This application provides English definitions as well as the Cantonese pronunciation, Pinyin pronunciation, and number of strokes to write each character. Unlike other translators, this program will only give the literal meaning of each character inputted (better for learning purposes).

Vigenère Encryption
Latest version 0.2 released on 16/2/2012
This application I have coded encrypts plaintext of any size using the Vigenère cipher method. The symmetric key used for the encryption process must be the same when decrypting the ciphertext. The longer and more unique your key is, the stronger the encryption will be. This Vigenère cipher I have implemented however is susceptible to cracks. It operates at the alphabet level whereas most modern encryption methods operate in bits. If you need to encrypt confidential data, I highly suggest you use my AES encryption implementation instead. It is presently infeasible to crack. Nevertheless, the advantage of this over my AES encryption is that the key is memorable. Yo...

Downloads

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Entertainment

About Me

I wouldn't want to bore you with what happens in my unexciting I.T life so here is the story of how I started using computers...

In late 1996 when I just turned 5, my family bought our first computer. For reasons unknown I was very fascinated by it and already in love with using them. Though this computer's processing power and capabilities were limited, I would very often use it to play JezzBall and muck around with (Microsoft) Paint as well as MS-DOS.

One and a half years passed and the habits of me using that Windows 95 computer continued. That is until we got a new Windows 98 computer not long after the operating system was released. This computer brought to me 5 unforgettable years of joy, learning, as well as scares. At first my brother and I would play classic fighting games such as Fatal Fury 3 non-stop. By non-stop I mean we would sit on the chair and play from day to night without even bothering to turn on the room lights when it was dark. In fact I remember us being scolded for this.

It wasn't long after that we moved into other computer areas such as the Internet in mid 1998. At that time there were far less users on the web and hence far less websites. Google was far from being the predominant search engine as Geocities was our number one source (at least for us). The low number of websites at that time did not stop us from finding all the Internet goodies such as videos, music, and games. I was 9 years old but with the help of my brother, already very familiar with download accelerators, different players, Photoshop 5.0, and even Windows 98 system files. I can still clearly remember the early mornings waking up at 5am, tiptoeing to the computer to connect to a dial-up connection, and onto the Internet using Netscape Navigator.

Now about the frightening side I mentioned earlier. Basically me and my brother would take turns testing unknown games on the computer. Under a number of times this led to the corruption of the Windows 98 system files and we would have to carry it to a specialist to fix. Of course my dad was not too happy with this. Me and my brother knew perfectly well that trying these unknown games was a risk so we took turns pressing the return (enter) key. Whoever pressed the key executing the program/game was the one at fault. The abundance of crashes we experienced was nevertheless very educational. We learnt a lot from the breakdowns and in some ways I can say that there probably could have been no better way to learn than that.

It is surely one of the greatest machines I'll have ever used in my life. I changed to a Windows XP computer in 2003 after 5 excellent years on that Windows 98 machine running a Pentium 2 based Celeron Covington processor with 64MB RAM. I feel privileged to have been a frequent user of the Internet (arguably) before the "great boom".