The Code Book
The Code Book by Simon Singh relates the history of cryptography, from the basics of hiding secrets which begins in ancient Greece with stenography, and then moves into the start of true cryptography with the invention of the monoalphabetic cypher. As he follows the changes in cryptography, it is not just the codes themselves he pays attention to, although he describes how each code was created and used, but also details the cryptanalyst that drove the development of new cyphers in their battle of wits. Singh tells us the origins and uses of the Vigenere cypher, and then relates how...
My New Android Phone and eugene_mobile
A couple of weeks ago, my family decided to take advantage of the T-Mobile Father’s Day deal, which gave away any phone in the store for each line on a new family plan. The result of this being the MyTouch Slide, one of T-Mobile’s offerings, that I currently hold in my hands. The only effect that this phone should have on my site is the occasional story about Android or an app, and the creation of a new user that will be used on this and other mobile devices, eugene_mobile (a small security measure to ensure the loss of this...
Installing Adobe Flash on Gentoo
To successfully install Adobe Flash into Gentoo Linux I took the following steps. Added the line www-plugins/adobe-flash to the file /etc/portage/package.keywords Added the line www-plugins/adobe-flash nsplugin to the file /etc/portage/package.use Added the line www-plugins/adobe-flash AdobeFlash-10 to the file /etc/portage/package.license Steps 1 and 2 may not be necessary, number 1 because the package is masked due to licensing issues rather than more generic issues, and number 2 because the package is a precompiled binary. If you discover one of the steps is unnecessary, pleas feel free to post which steps you successfully omitted.
Failing to get off Adobe Flash
Yesterday I finally tired of the horrible things that the flash plugin I was using did to my CPU from time to time. Seeing as I was using the adobe version, I thought it might be worth trying to install one of the open source alternatives. Most recently, I had heard about Gnash, leading me to give that option a try first. After a bit of work getting it working with Firefox (more to do with the fact I had far too many tabs open at the time, so had to close all of them so that Firefox could restart)...
My Linux Printing Struggle
I’ve been staving off doing it in the weeks since I installed Gentoo, but I finally was forced to configure my system to work with my printer. In a normal system, this might not leave an administrator filled with a feeling of dread, but I print over the network to a shared printer on a Windows server, and always seem to fight a battle to get it to work. Part of my distaste for this operation is leftover from when we used a dlink wireless print server - which helped instill me with a hate for wireless that I only...