Attached to this blog post (and on the EnfranchisedMind podcast feed) is the introduction to The Indie3 Project by Crystal, the one-time co-host of Dave’s Lounge.

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And I’m not sure how much faith I’d put into a new hash algorithm being the savior here. The security of the system now relies on the cryptographic robustness of the hashing algorithm- remember, the attacker only has to find a sequence which demonstrates worst case, or near worst case, behavior in order to launch the denial of service attack. So if there is a cryptographic flaw in the algorithm which allows a malicious attacker to discover collisions much cheaper than brute force, then it becomes computationally feasible for the attacker to compute the worst case sequence, especially once they put their botnet on to it.

Comments

• March 18, 2010, Mike G. wrote: Your "Way back When" is still 5 years after that paper was published in 2003. That paper did cause quite a stir, though. Among other things, the implementation of perl was changed to avoid this issue after the paper was published.

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Comments

• January 12, 2010, Chris M wrote: Sounds to me like you want Rob Bell's book: Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality http://www.amazon.com/dp/0310280672
• January 12, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: It's on the reading list, but the half-assed scholarship and pop theology in Velvet Elvis has left me pretty cynical about Rob Bell: I'm not sure I'd trust anything he has to say.
• January 12, 2010, Chris M wrote: Eh... well, you don't have to trust any of it-- but it might give you some ideas to think about anyway. I haven't actually read it myself, but your request immediately reminded me of it. It's a fairly blatant title.
• January 12, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: Yeah, no kidding: that title's pretty much exactly what I asked for. :)
• January 12, 2010, Chris M wrote: And I won't even mention the horrible Focus on the Family audio cassette tapes my mom made me listen to when I was going through puberty.
• January 16, 2010, Mike wrote: http://www.reuniting.info
• January 19, 2010, Mike K wrote: Here is a book from an evangelical Christian perspective: "Sex and the Supremacy of Christ". I haven't read the book myself but I have a good deal of familiarity with the author's works and it should be worthwhile - http://www.desiringgod.org/Store/Books/603_Sex_and_the_Supremacy_of_Christ/
• January 20, 2010, David Dickinson wrote: I'm just catching up on my RSS feeds, so I apologize if this is too late. My proposal for a Ph.D. thesis in 1999 was "A Theology of the Erotic," which was received favorably, but unfortunately my job forced me to move before I could start. I had mainly done exegetical work around the image of God (Gen 1:26-27) and the sexual aspects related to that so I didn't get too far down the theology book path, but a few I recommend are: Roger Scruton, "Sexual Desire"--A philosophy book rather than theology, but very insightful, especially his use of Wittgenstein's "Private Language" argument. Helmut Thielicke, "The Ethics of Sex"--More than just ethics, an insightful examination of sex from a Christian spiritual aspect Phyllis Trible, "God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality."--I didn't always agree with her exegesis or conclusions, but interesting, thoughtful and provocative Shmuley Boteach, "Kosher Sex"--An interesting presentation of intimacy from a Jewish perspective using the Talmud and OT
• January 21, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: It's never too late.
• February 9, 2010, David wrote: Taboo: Sex, Religion & Magick By Christopher S. Hyatt and Lon Milo DuQuette http://tinyurl.com/y2phl6 Sexuality, Magic, and Perversion By Francis King http://tinyurl.com/yzqf2sv Sex, The Secret Gate to Eden - Alchemy, Tantra, and Kabbalah Video from Thelema Press [Sketchy at times, and makes a fundamental error (from a tantric-variant's bias) about the relationship of the orgasm to the specialized definition of "chastity", but extraordinary in illuminating core symbolism.] http://tinyurl.com/yhavkdt Consider: Masonic symbolism...as you are probably discovering. The mapping of modern masonic myths (clothed in the mythology of esoteric Judaism) to their Egyptian origins (Memphis-Misraim). The "lost word" in relation to the (in your words) "basic nature of all religions" as the unity form of the ubiquitous glyphs of primary duality involving a "cross" and a "circle" (ankh, celtic cross, rose cross, sacred heart, etc.), and their procreative aspects depicted in the three-fold expressions as the various glyphs of trinity, and finally the self-reflexivity in the four-fold expansion as the tetragrammaton...the Logos as Ouroboros. Solve et Coagula. The procedure for the Philosopher's Stone as given in the Emerald Tablet: solutio, putrefactio, albedo, citrinitatio, destillatio, coagulatio, tinctura. The Kybalion. Unrelated (perhaps), here are some inter-woven almost-quotes from the New Testament and Liber AL vel Legis: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." "God is Agape." "Because of your Thelema they existed." "Your kingdom come. Your Thelema be done." "On these two commandments [of Agape] depend the whole Nomos." "Agape is the Nomos, Agape under Thelema." "The Logos of the Nomos is Thelema." "The Book of the Nomos is Written and Concealed." "Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the Nomos of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God." "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." "For I am divided for Agape's sake, for the chance of union." Moab-Ammon, Ben-Ammon, Ben-Moab, Moab-On "rise up and walk" Son of the Father, Seed of the Sun IAO Aum Ha
• June 1, 2010, catherine grace wrote: would be interested to learn more about the topic you are researching...it's something that i am also meditating on. looking forward to the next post.
• August 2, 2010, MC, spiritual writer wrote: Brian McLaren has written a book called "A New Kind of Christianity." I'm not usually a fan of his, but I'd heard some good things so I thought I would give it a go. Honestly, most of the book was pretty fluffy, but the chapter on sexuality was very powerful, interesting, and thoughtful. I've done a review of it on my blog, and there are a lot of excerpts there if you want to get a taste before you dive in.

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The problem is that I also picked up a Toshiba external HDD to plug into this beast. The Toshiba drive exposes not *one* but *two* volumes. These two volumes are not two partitions: they are two distinct volumes. One is a “Virtual CD” riddled with Windows software, and there’s no way to get rid of it. A few hours of searching the Internet and hacking on the thing later, I finally gave up and ran it back to Best Buy.

I then picked up an HP SimpleSave, which has better reviews (especially from Linux users). Of course, the one I grabbed has a bent USB connection, so it was utterly worthless. Exchanged it for a new one at Best Buy, plugged it in, and life is good.

Comments

• January 11, 2010, Stefan A. wrote: Just took a look at the specs of the SimpleNET Nas. Do you know if it is possible to do RAID 1 with the two connected harddrives?
• January 11, 2010, Chris Conway wrote: I've got a similar issue with an IOCELL flash drive (a fixed, read-only volume called CASTELLA). Very annoying. I think you might be able to remove the volume in Windows.
• January 11, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: @Chris Yeah, I got that recommendation from some online forum. Tried to remove it via my wife's Vista, and that failed. Also tried to use software from the Toshiba website, and that failed (claimed to not find a VirtualCD volume). As far as I'm concerned, it's not worth my effort, and I want to punish Toshiba by returning their product to Best Buy and picking something up from their competitor. The HP SimpleSave drive I picked up worked right out of the box: just plugged it in and went. @Stefan A No obvious way to set up RAID 1 via the web interface.

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One of the things I’ve done is adopted a kind of “Downloads Zero” approach (akin to “Inbox Zero“): I had built up a lot of crap in the Downloads folder, and I had become afraid of what to throw away and what was important. This ate up a bunch of hard drive and was generally a source of low-grade anxiety that I didn’t need. So I’ve implemented a new plan: each I log into my computer, I wipe the Downloads folder completely. This means that if something’s important in Downloads, I have to consciously move it out of that folder and into someplace else. So far, it’s going great: there’s a surprisingly refreshing feeling when I see an empty Downloads folder!

To implement this on OS-X, create a folder named ~/logs and a file named ~/bin/cleanup_downloads.command with the following content:

name=cleanup_downloads
rm -PRf ~/Downloads/* 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

Then, in System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items, click the little + and select ~/bin/cleanup_downloads.command.

Comments

• November 24, 2009, Antony Jones wrote: Good ideas, personally I make all operations on temporary files on my desktop, meaning I'm constantly reminded if things are not clean and tidy! I find the ~/Downloads folder is a bit hidden away for my liking.
• November 24, 2009, Michael E wrote: Interesting idea. I too suffer from a large quantity of cruft in my downloads folder (it was worse in my Windows days, when i would carry around gigabytes of frequently outdated freeware installers). I'm not sure if I'm quite ready to get this extreme about it, but it might be beneficial.
• November 24, 2009, Robert Fischer wrote: @Michael It's not that extreme: after all, if it's in the downloads folder, you got it from the internet, which means you can always get it from the internet again if you need to!
• November 24, 2009, Barry Kelly wrote: I just file away everything I download to my file server, into directories created according to date, in an automated fashion. My file server is over 7TB in size, and it'll grow exponentially over time as HDs get larger, so I generally don't worry about it.
• November 24, 2009, Barry Kelly wrote: Oh, and it's a mistake to think you can download everything again. It's can be hard enough to find many e.g. game mods and the like three or four years after the fact, never mind 10 or 12.
• November 25, 2009, Robert Fischer wrote: @Barry If I had effectively unlimited disk space on my network, I'd probably do the same: instead of deleting, I'd just move it over to a mounted network directory based on date. I'm not in that position, though, so I just wipe it. I considered burning everything to DVDs every once in a while, but that seems like a pain and more hassle than it's worth. If there's something valuable which I may want later, I'll just have to be pro-active about saving it or accept life without it. So far, I've been able to survive just fine that way.
• November 29, 2009, Ingo Richter wrote: Great Idea! After reading your blog post I had a look into one of my Downloads folder. On my Desktop machine there were 12G of data and files. Much more than I thought. And lot's of really old stuff. Huge amount of wasted diskspace. Now I will do the same with my Downloads folder. Remove everthing that wasn't filed accordingly (if neccessary at all) and gain more space for the important stuff. Thanks.

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