So, I wrote a guide on how to do some basic tasks in emacs.

Let me know of any mistakes/improvements that you can think of in the comments!

P.S. I’m pretty fond of the mock terminal that I made with CSS.

The only reason I noticed this was because Firefox was marking words such as “organization” and “enrollment” as being spelled wrong.

If anyone wants to look at their current setting, open about:config and search for the key “spellchecker.dictionary”.

This dilemma got me thinking and I decided to purchase a dot name domain. ryan.lewis.name now points here!

# mount -t ntfs-3g -o force /dev/sda1 /mnt/win
Unexpected clusters per mft record (-127).
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sda1' doesn't have a valid NTFS.

I tried to recover it using a Windows XP disk, but that didn’t work because it wouldn’t recognize my C:\WINDOWS folder! At this point, I was getting pretty worried.

So, back in Ubuntu, I do a bit more reading and find out about the testdisk command (apt-get install testdisk) and a nice post about how to use it on the Ubuntu forums. To summarize, this is what I took out of that post to get mount to actually work after:

After starting testdisk, choose “No log”, choose the correct HDD and “Proceed”, choose “Intel”, choose “Advanced”, select the Windows partition, choose “Boot”, then choose “Rebuild BS”.

If testdisk gives you a warning that the “Extrapolated boot sector and current boot sector are different”, then choose “Write”.

Sure enough, something was messed and it was able to fix it after I selected “Write”.

After all this, mount worked, and when I rebooted, the Windows XP disk detected the installation and I was able to fix my MBR like I wanted.

We present a method for zero-knowledge, hash-based challenge-response network authentication in lieu of transmitting a password across the network. Zero-knowledge protocols, like our method, offer authentication alternatives to prevent a third-party from discovering a password after intercepting network data. Our method makes use of one-way hash functions to generate a response from a randomly-created challenge code supplied by an identity verifier. Our method also makes use of dynamic engagement for choosing which hash functions are used on a per-case basis, in order to thwart reversal of our method in the event of future discovery of weaknesses in any of the deployed hash functions.

Zero-Knowledge and You: A Beginner’s Guide to SPHiNX & Challenge-Response Protocols (PDF)

Webpage running SPHiNX

high-performance, portable C++ library providing data structures and algorithms for manipulating signed, arbitrary length integers, and for vectors, matrices, and polynomials over the integers and over finite fields.

I have been using it a lot because of the Cryptography class that I’m in this semester, and something that I need to do frequently is generate random numbers.

To do this, seeding is frequently required, and the NTL is no different, but it took a while for me to actually get it to work. The following will seed the random functions provided by the NTL ZZ class:

ZZ number, seed;
srand(getpid());
seed << ((long) GetTime() ^ rand());
SetSeed(seed);
RandomLen(number, rand() % 300);

Stick that at the top of your main() and you should be all set.

Also, does anyone know of a shorter, possibly easier to remember, way to do this? If so, the comments are open.

Please don’t send useless email to the lists…

But, when are new things ever easy?

To make a long story short, I had to generate a custom modeline for X to be able to use the TV’s native resolution, 1360×768. I read to use the command cvt 1360 768 60.015Hz, but the returned modeline resulted in a “Mode Not Supported” error from the TV. Instead, I had to use a Windows program called PowerStrip to grab the custom timings that actually worked. Though, the only reason they worked was by luck because Windows didn’t properly detect the monitor either, so I used PowerStrip to add a custom resolution to my registry which was preset with working timings.

Anyway, PowerStrip was nice enough to generate an xorg.conf modeline for me and had to edit the following in my file (this is assuming that you already have the proprietary nVidia drivers already working):

…

Section "Monitor"
    …
    Modeline "1360x768" 85.500 1360 1440 1552 1792 768 771 777 795 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

…

Section "Screen"
    …
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth  24
        Virtual 1360 768
        Modes "1360x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

…

Note: any ellipses (…) in the above are just cutting out parts that were not changed in my file.

UPDATE: I figured that I would make a note that I recently tried getting a new computer to work with this television and didn’t have as much luck. The new computer was using an ATI Radeon 4850 rather than the nVidia card that I got working previously. Ultimately, I couldn’t get the VGA out to work and had to switch to using an HDMI connection. After I did that, Ubuntu 8.10 (the same OS that I was using previously) automatically detected the native resolution of this TV. Therefore, I recommend using HDMI over VGA to get this TV to work in Linux.

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

I’m gonna show you some really basic ways to use CouchDB using a PHP class found on their website and assume that you have PHP 5.1 or greater and CouchDB 0.8 installed successfully.

The first thing that we need to do is create a sample database for us to play eventually play with using PHP. To manage your databases and documents, you can use Futon, CouchDB’s administrative frontend. It can be accessed at http://localhost:5984/_utils. Create a database called “people” with two documents in it with random IDs that each have two fields in them: “name” and “age”. Also, be sure to enter in some values for those.

Let’s look at this PHP file:

<?php
include_once "CouchDB.php";

$couchdb = new CouchDB("people", "9.57.30.200");
$view = '{ "map": "function(doc) { emit(null, doc); }" }';

try {
  $all = $couchdb->send("/_temp_view", "post", $view)->getBody(true);
}
catch (CouchDBException $e) {
  die("[ERROR]".$e->getMessage()."\n");
}

foreach ($all->rows as $k => $row) {
  echo "Name: ".$row->value->name." / Age: ".$row->value->age."<br/>";
}
?>

This code is using a temporary view to query the database and then simply looping through the returned JSON and printing data from it.  If you set up your database as I mentioned above, $all should be structured like this:

stdClass Object
(
  [total_rows] => 2
  [offset] => 0
  [rows] => Array
  (
    [0] => stdClass Object
    (
      [id] => 4144833052c61ab553875737b88ef91a
      [key] =>
      [value] => stdClass Object
      (
        [_id] => 4144833052c61ab553875737b88ef91a
        [_rev] => 3595404992
        [name] => Ryan
        [age] => 20
      )
    )
    [1] => stdClass Object
    (
      [id] => ff3f20d54772b92aad43c36d6ed4abd1
      [key] =>
      [value] => stdClass Object
      (
        [_id] => ff3f20d54772b92aad43c36d6ed4abd1
        [_rev] => 994830077
        [name] => Bob
        [age] => 40
      )
    )
  )
)

When I visit the page running the script, it will therefore output this:

Name: Ryan / Age: 20
Name: Bob / Age: 40

If anyone wants to see how to do something, just post a comment and I’ll try to whip something up. Also, the CouchDB Wiki has a lot more information if you’re interested.