Stavros' Stuff

On programming and other things.

Hamachi

Since I’m no good at prologues, I will get right to the subject. I guess that was a prologue, though. Turns out I am a bit good at them. It wasn’t particularly good, but oh well, it serves its purpose. So, without further ado, I present to you… Hamachi!

Hamachi is “a zero-configuration virtual private networking application with an open security architecture and NAT-to

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Trashing Linux

Have you ever wondered what the joke answer to every Linux-related question (“rm -rf /”) actually does? You know it deletes everything, but have you ever seen it? Well, for your viewing pleasure, I have trashed my Ubuntu system. It wasn’t really what I expected it to be, nothing blew up. I won’t spoil it for you though, I’ll let you see for yourself. If the video runs a bit fast it’s because I’ve

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Webhost change

I just switched webhosts, I went with A small orange. I had heard many good things about them, and I reviewed their offerings. They offer everything FuitadNET does, but they have Ruby and Python support. I signed up for the small plan, which is $5/mo (I paid $7.5 at FuitadNET) but I have 400 MB of space and 10 GB of traffic per month (I only use about 150 and 1 respe

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Firefly

I just watched the last episode of Firefly, and I have to say, it is amazing. It is easily one of the best shows I have ever seen (together with Family Guy). If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you buy/rent/steal (I’m just kidding, I don’t think they rent it) and watch it immediately. Even if you don’t like that kind of shows (or any kind of show, or peo

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Allofmp3.com

When I visited Digg today I came upon this site, called Allofmp3. From it you can buy songs totally legally for as little as $0.02 per megabyte. They even have this cool service that encodes the files to whatever format you want (I recommend OGG Vorbis at Q6), so you end up paying about $3 for a whole CD (and not old ones or anything, they have almost

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An important day

Today was a very important day for me. I logged on to my site to reconfigure something, and I saw some new comments posted. When I read them, I couldn’t believe my eyes! I had my first flamer! I am posting the first comment below, for posterity:

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Petals Around the Rose

I stumbled upon a game today, it’s called Petals Around the Rose. It’s played with 5 dice, and you can only be told these three things about the game:

  1. The name of the game is significant.
  2. The number of petals comes from the dice, there’s only one answer for each roll and it’s either 0 or an even number.
  3. You can be told the number of petals after each roll.

Your goal is to figure

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Authentication

Some time ago I thought of an authentication scheme for website registration (or anything else) using asymmetric encryption, which went something like this (Alice is the user, Bob is the server):

  1. Alice signs up for an account and gives her public key to Bob.
  2. Bob stores it.
  3. When Alice wants to log on to Bob’s site, Bob sends her a random number of sufficient length, Alice signs it,

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Hard disk crash

OK, it’s like this: Originally I had one 80 GB disk, one 120 GB disk and a 160 GB one that stopped working three months after I bought it (damn Maxtor). Last week I got a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda so I’d finally have some space (all the other disks were full).

The new disk arrived, I ghosted the 80 one on the 250 (after quite a few crashes and hangs, which after a while stopped), and I installed t

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