Make no mistake, the time, energy, and resources needed to ween the United States off its dependance on oil are somewhat prohibitive to that occurance happening anytime soon. However, it is heartening to see other countries figuring it out. Case in point, Brazil.
Archive for March, 2006
Dropping off the Grid
Saturday, March 18th, 2006What Won’t I Do For Sushi
Friday, March 17th, 2006I had sushi for lunch a couple days ago with Ben and Mark. Now, I love sushi, and pretty much do what I can to eat it whenever possible. Not having had breakfast, I was particularly hungry. I finished my roll in record time and, having not silenced my tummy, began eyeing one of the last two pieces left on Ben’s plate. Surely a deal can be struck where I could partake of at least one of those morsels. There was.
The Bet
The Prize
I’ll take that bet
Once the wasabi entered my mouth, I broke it into three more managable sub-blobs. Each one, on spreading out over my tongue and hitting my throat, felt like a kick in the crotch by an NFL placekicker. The upside was that the discomfort lasted only moments. The downside was that it still felt like getting kicked in the crotch. After much coughing, reddening of the face, and assuring a fellow patron that I was okay, the wasabi was down, the previously eaten sushi remained internal, and I began to eye my prize. Not fazed by what I had just done, I promptly dipped the morsel into my soy-wasabi mixture, thereby eliciting another kick-to-the-crotch sensation, though this time only with the power of a 1st grader. I must say, it was well worth it.
SSH In Without A Password
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006Want to connect to a remote server without having to type in those annoying passwords? Have you generated your public and private keys? That is a must my friend.
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -f filename
This will create two files: ‘filename’, your private key, and ‘filename.pub’, your public key. Store the private key away (probably $HOME/.ssh) and put your public key on the remote server.
Assuming you put the private key in the $HOME/.ssh directory, you need to run
$ ssh-add $HOME/.ssh/filename
and this will put your new key into ssh’s knowledge.
****IMPORTANT****
When prompted, do not enter a passphrase, or else you will need this passphrase to use the key, thus negating the purpose of the key for password-less connection. Do not use this key pairing when you need the added security of a passphrase. You have been warned.
******************
Now we need to setup the remote machine. This is fairly trivial using the ssh-copy-id command.
$ ssh-copy-id -i $HOME/.ssh/filename.pub user@remotemachine.com
The command should return with a success message and an ssh command to try your new key out with. If this doesn’t work, RTFM!
Minesweeper
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006With all the to-do and hub-bub with regards to World Pi Day (see post below), I have been on a math kick. Now, back in my youth…hmm…back in my college days (not too long ago) I got pretty fanatic about Minesweeper. I quickly found that Beginner and Intermediate were for n00bs like Boink and moved on to Expert. Having solved Expert countless times, I found myself recognizing patterns faster and found the increase in pattern recognition to correlate positively with lower completion times. Alas, I burned out prior to breaking the 100 second threshold. However, I recently (read: minutes ago) came across a website that showed me that my Minesweeper foray could have developed into a $1,000,000 pursuit, had I realized that Minesweeper is NP-complete. It was at this point in the article (a good two headings in) that things went really over my head, but the guy claims Minesweeper to be the key one of the most important proofs (or disproofs (a word???)) in the current mathematical world!!! Oh snap! Is he right? Who knows…read it for yourself and find out.
OSS History
Monday, March 13th, 2006Go Outside
Monday, March 13th, 2006This report doesn’t exactly break new ground, but it does reinforce common sense thinking. Want adults to have respect for the environment? Get them involved in the environment from an early age. Kind of a ‘Duh’ conclusion but it seems worth posting and maybe someone will take it to heart and raise a kid to respect our world.
Pi has everything
Sunday, March 12th, 2006Oh man, oh man. I can’t believe the level of my geekiness sometimes, but I have to share this. Pi seems to have so many numerical combinations contained in its string of numbers. For example,
My birthday, 07171982, was found at position 116,728,043 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.
My zipcode, 63146, was found at position 135,918 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.
My street address, 12394, was found at position 8,831 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.
Want to search some of your numbers? Check out the site. Also, there are some interesting analyses and fun facts concerning Pi and its value.
Update: As tomorrow is World Pi Day, I thought I’d add an article or two covering various parts of Pi, like its history and general background. Happy reading and happy Pi Day.
Claypool, Indiana, to house biodiesel plant
Saturday, March 11th, 2006New plant to be built in the next 18 months in Claypool, Indiana, that will effectively double the United States’ biodiesel production capabilities. From the article:
The project, which was announced last year, combines a soybean processing plant with a biodiesel production plant. The facility will crush nearly 50 million bushels of soybeans a year, producing more than 1 million tons of soybean meal for animal feed and 80 million gallons of biodiesel.
Hopefully biodiesel pumps will start springing up here in St. Louis, providing me with incentive to actually trade in my car for a diesel.
SysInfo, Part 1
Saturday, March 11th, 2006Need more detailed information about your *nix system than you’ll actually ever use? /proc contains a bevy of information that can help you diagnose problems or just learn more about your system. Where does one begin though? Part one in a series of articles on /proc on the Linux Forums begins the process of developing your *nix and /proc foo.
LAMPPP Solid
Tuesday, March 7th, 2006LAMPPP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Python/Perl) was recently deemed the most secure open source software package by a government-backed study.
In the analysis, more than 17.5 million lines of code from 32 open-source projects were scanned. On average, 0.434 bugs per 1,000 lines of code were found, Coverity said. The LAMP stack, however, ’showed significantly better software quality,” with an average of 0.29 defects per 1,000 lines of code, the technology company said.