E-mail date

E-mail should have a date header corresponding to the date of the event being advertised for automatic calendar interfacing.

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Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

AES256

AES-256 is trivially breakeable by chosen plaintext attack in 2^128 work by enumerating all possible 128-bit input blocks.

Galois FFT

How do Discrete Fourier and Cosine Transforms behave in finite fields, such as GF(2^8)?

Cullen Primes

On August 23, 2005, Mark Rodenkirch found the largest known Cullen prime, 1354828*2^1354828+1.

rpmbuild dkms nvidia

rpmbuild --rebuild dell-nvidia-6624-1dkms.src.rpm

rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/dell-nvidia-6624-1dkms.i386.rpm

be sure kernel-devel or kernel-smp-devel is installed.

Firefox shift click select

Click one point on a firefox page. Do not drag. Shift-click somewhere else. The region betwen is selected.

A day's work

gnome-panel gaim-otr owl

plus backups, purging most files, chsh, xemacs sumo package install. up next: pbzip2

What I dislike about Metacity

...coming from Sawfish. Some of these problems may be fixable by configuration; then again, metacity is notoriously unconfigurable.

I want opaque cycle-windows (alt-tab) and opaque move-window and resize-window.

(custom-set-keymap (quote window-keymap) (quote (keymap (raise-or-pass-through-click . "Button1-Click") (resize-window-interactively . "M-Button3-Move") )))

Note that raise-or-pass-through-click is different from raise-and-pass-through-click.

(bind-keys global-keymap "F5" '(display-window (get-window-by-name-re "Mozilla") ))

Can't let windows go beyond the top edge of the screen (intentionally hiding the titlebar).

Encrypted mailing list links

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mmreencrypt/ http://www.rediris.es/app/pgplist/index.en.html http://www.synacklabs.net/projects/crypt-ml/

http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rgooch/PGPsendmail.html http://www.raphinou.com/smailman/smailman.html

windowmanger escape key

I wish there were a window manager escape key, which signals "I want to talk to the window manager now, not the application that has focus." The entire keyboard becomes available after the escape, enabling a vast palette of window manipulation operations ("restore the window arrangement to the one I named foobar"). On a Kinesis, I might bind the windowmanager escape key to the footswitch.

Search images on day

Assuming people set the clocks on their digital cameras (ha ha) correctly (ha ha), someone like Google could offer Image Search for photos taken on a certain day, by using EXIF information on jpegs. Or the camera can get the time from the cell network, or GPS, etc.

Someday, cameras will do GPS (some cell phones with cameras already have GPS, though I don't know if the encode the location information into the metadata) and we can search for all photos taken near a certain location at a certain time (and GPS can automatically get the correct time, too).

When Big Brother has us all get chips embedded in our skulls, and tracks our location via satellite, one could cross reference the people location data with the camera location (at a given point in time) to automatically identify people in a photograph. Or the camera could directly ping the Big Brother chips. These Big Brother chips could be the cell phones we already all carry around that record location at low resolution, or some Bluetooth variant.

JPEG tools

jpegtran does lossless rotations of jpeg images. The beta version, codenamed "croppatch" does lossless cropping, too.

jhead can extract the EXIF metadata from jpg and tif files.

knoppix tohd

The "tohd=/dev/hdb7" cheatcode rules! (As I have a flaky CD-ROM drive (Creative) that fails to read the CD occasionally.)

pi-th root of unity and Tan 1

While thinking about the "Pith root of unity", I found (cos 1)+(sin 1)i which is actually the (2*pi)-th root of unity. The one-radian angle marks out an equilateral wedge: both straight segments and the curved part are all the same length. Whereas sin(1) and and cos(1) are not especially interesting continued fractions, their ratio, the tangent of 1 radian, the slope of the ray to the 2*pi-th root of unity, does have a regular continued fraction:

In[3]:= ContinuedFraction[Tan[1],100]

Out[3]= {1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 5, 1, 7, 1, 9, 1, 11, 1, 13, 1, 15, 1, 17, 1, 19, 1, 21, 1, 23, 1, 25, 1, 27, 1, 29, 1, 31, 1, 33, 1, 35, 1, 37, 1, 39, 1, 41, 1, 43, 1, 45, 1, 47, 1, 49, 1, 51, 1, 53, 1, 55, 1, 57, 1, 59, 1, 61, 1, 63, 1, 65, 1, 67, 1, 69, 1, 71, 1, 73, 1, 75, 1, 77, 1, 79, 1, 81, 1, 83, 1, 85, 1, 87, 1, 89, 1, 91, 1, 93, 1, 95, 1, 97, 1, 99}

P2P filesystem

AFS or NFS backed by bittorrent instead of servers, with aggressive local disk caching, onto which is installed all of Debian.

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Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

Two-finger typing

For mobile devices: Partition the alphabet into two halves, minimizing the number of consecutive letters typed in each half.

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Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

Average change

On average, you get back 2 pennies, 0.4 nickles, 0.8 dimes, 1.5 quarters, or 50 cents; a ratio of 5:1:2:3.75.

baseball

What is the speed of a baseball as it comes off a baseball bat?

Interestingly, most baseballs are pitched faster than terminal velocity (75 mph)

basketball

What would basketball be like if points were awarded according to distance of shot? Again, computer vision to calc release points.

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Boxing

What would boxing be like if computer vision was used to measure the speed and force of each punch?

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Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

vc-cancel-version and RCS branch

I'm finding the vc-cancel-version command in xemacs (I think it runs rcs -o) quite cool.

I suppose I will cry when I accidentally cancel a version I didn't want to cancel.

It would be cooll if instead of saying version 1.4 and 1.5 never existed, it would instead make 1.4 and 1.5 a branch off of 1.3.

Damnsmalllinux Right Alt Key

xmodmap -e "remove mod4 = Mode_switch"
xmodmap -e "keycode 108 = Alt_R"
xmodmap -e "add mod1 = Alt_R"