Still here? Good.

At one point yesterday one website occupied the screens of no fewer than nine journalists across Pro and our neighbours at MacUser (sorry guys). It’s called Fantastic Contraption and, I really can’t emphasise this warning enough, it’s more addictive than crack.

It’s simple yet incredibly complex, if that makes sense. You start in the light blue zone, and all you have to do is get the pink object into the target zone; all you have at your disposal are rotating cogs, wooden rods and watery “string”.

Roll the object on home-made caterpillars; catapult it with a trebuchet; construct your own terrain-mashing death tank if you have the imagination for it – it’s entirely up to you. The only laws that matter are those of physics, with everything interacting exactly as you’d expect.

Try it if you dare. Even after completing all 20 levels you’ll be going back to try them in different ways. And the ability to view other people’s wierd and wonderful solutions online just emphasises how much freedom you have in your methods.

Don’t click these links until you’ve completed the respective levels for yourselves, but here’s a few we came up with when we really should have been busy writing a magazine. (Just click the green Start button in the top-left corner to set them going).

Level 17 – Handling

Level 19 – Back and Forth

Level 20 – Unpossible

Be creative, try your own methods and post the links to your best contraptions in the comments below – we’re sure you can do even better than us.

However, perhaps it is because it is a slow news day or I the fact that I need to get something geeky into my system following the mind-numbing experience that is shopping at Tesco, but a press release from Protegrity Corporation and Teradata managed to get me considering the speed of encryption question.

It would seem, in the case of the Protegrity/Teradata data security management partnership at any rate, the answer is more than 9 million encryptions per second. Decryption performance is lacking though, at just 6 million decryptions per second. Oh the shame!

The speeds were reported after testing carried out using a Protegrity Defiance data Protection System combined with Teradata User Defined Functions in order to embed encryption and decryption functionality within a database. The parallel architecture and high performance UDF implementation allows for a highly efficient execution utilising industry standard AES-256 encryption and a six node Teradata 5550 platform with 12 Intel Xeon processors.

All very impressive stuff. But when it comes to encryption speed records I guess it all comes down to how you do the measuring, the metric that you use. For sure, 9 million encryptions per second is a good one, no doubt about that. However, it just doesn’t seem to carry the same gravitas as creating an encryption key at 4 million bits per second over a distance of 1km. Now that has a certain Olympic feel about it, conjuring up images of some nerdy guy reciting the value of Pi to a million digits while running a marathon at the same time. That’s the kind of speed record I am talking about.

Unfortunately, when the people behind the record actually do start talking about it you might wish you hadn’t asked. How about “The NIST fiber QKD system has two channels operating over optical fibers that are wrapped around a spool between two personal computers in a laboratory. The photons are sent in different quantum states, or orientations of their electric field, representing 0 and 1. The system compensates for temperature changes and vibration, which could affect performance, with a NIST-designed module that automatically adjusts photon orientation on a time schedule” for starters?