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.

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

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.

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.

Note: All of the old files that were originally located directly off of the index (i.e. content.php), are now located in the old/ directory (so, now that link is located at old/content.php), but all folders have remained in the same place (i.e. TEST/test5.php is still located exactly there).

On a side note, I am still indeed working on Project GOTO. I am working out kinks in the mail program so that bots don’t use it to spam (this is why my feedback form is now disabled). I expect to have a new release in a few weeks.