Archive for October, 2008

A crypto-puzzle

Friday, October 31st, 2008

enigma_3

Yesterday I was reading the network security book I talked about before and I found out a funny criptography game, which took me kinda a lot of time to solve. These ciphers are simple substitution ciphers of the type that many people like to amuse themselves trying to solve. Newspapers often publish a daily cryptopuzzle (along the lines of a daily crossword puzzle) which readers try to solve — often during their daily commutes. Anyway, here it is:

Cf lqr’xs xsnyctm n eqxxqgsy iqul qf wdcp eqqh, erl lqrx qgt iqul!

Free cookies to who can solve it! As proof, you must include the md5 of the string “all_caps_solution:all_caps_nick” (double quotes excluded). For the record, mine is f2ee0b5b3ad916313414e29ce5c578e6 ;)

Gott God?

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

sun-light-from-above_1042

Anselm of Canterbury
:

God is, by definition, a being greater than anything that can be imagined. Existence both in reality and in imagination is greater than existence solely in one’s imagination. Therefore, God must exist in reality: if God did not, God would not be a being greater than anything that can be imagined.

Epicurus:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

A modern tale

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

ballantine_snoopy_dark_stormy_night

It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere in the distance a dog howled. A shiny object caught Alice’s eye. A diamond cufflink! Only one person in the household could afford diamond cufflinks!

So it was the butler, after all! Alice had to warn Bob. But how could she get a message to him without alerting the butler? If she phoned Bob, the butler might listen on an extension. If she sent a carrier pigeon out the window with the message taped to its foot, how would Bob know if it was Alice that was sending the message and not Trudy attempting to frame the butler because she spurned her advances?

That’s what this book is about. Not much about character development for Alice and Bob, we’re afraid; nor do we really get to know the butler. But we do discuss how to communicate securely over an insecure medium…

From “Network Security: PRIVATE communication in a PUBLIC world“.

Packaging

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

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Today I’ve started to write some PKGBUILDs for the linux distribution that I use, Archlinux: a PKGBUILD is a small script that works with the makepkg utility. It automatically downloads the source of the program, verifies the md5, configures and compiles it creating a new package, ready to be installed with pacman. It looks like gentoo’s emerge. It’s cool ;) Anyway, at the moment I am maintaining four packages and I am kinda enjoying myself. Let’s see if it will last :D

Simple but effective

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

Mindblowing:
numbers
Credits go to AbstruseGoose.