Extending a geometric construction due to Sederberg and to Bajaj, Holt, and Netravali, an algorithm is presented for parameterizing a nonsingular cubic surface by polynomials of degree three. The fact that such a parametrization exists is classical. The present algorithm is, by its purely geometric nature, a very natural one. Moreover, it contains a practical way of finding all lines in an implicitly given cubic surface. Two explicit examples are presented, namely the classical Clebsch diagonal surface and the cubic Fermat surface.

In this paper, an explicit construction of binary self-dual cyclic codes of lengthngoing to infinity with a minimal distance at least half the square root ofnis presented. The same idea is also used to construct more general binary cyclic codes with a large minimal distance. Finally, in the special case of self-dual cyclic codes, a simplified version of a proof by Conway and Sloane is given, showing an upper bound for the distance of binary self-dual codes.