(Feb 2008) When it comes to password strength, it's all about the length.
In general, if a number is of the form xy, it is the exponent y that will dominate its value. In other words, if you want to make xy bigger, increasing x will only increase the magnitude somewhat, but increasing y will greatly increase the magnitude.
What this means, is that the best way to make a secure password is to make it long, because (crudely speaking) the strength of the password is proportional to CL, where C is the size of the character set the password is chosen from, and L is the password length. For short (8-10 character) passwords, increasing C by adding more different types of characters does make it stronger. However, increasing L (lengthening the password) makes it much stronger. The best is to use a long passphrase.
For example, if your password consists of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation/symbols, the size of the character set is about 96 characters. So the size of the password space for 8-character passwords is about 968 = 7,213,895,789,838,336 = 7.2*1015. (Before you think that's a big number, remember that modern computers are easily capable of brute-forcing billions of passwords per second.) But if your password consists only of upper- and lowercase letters and spaces (making C only about 53), yet you make it longer—say 12 characters—the password space is about 5312 = 491,258,904,256,726,171,648 = 4.9*1020. That's five orders of magnitude greater than the shorter password with those fancy numbers and symbols! And if you use a passphrase of, say, 20 characters, the password space grows to about 3.05*1034. That's 14 orders of magnitude bigger than the 12-character password, and 19 orders of magnitude than the original 8-character password.
So, the moral of the story is, if you want a more secure password, focus on making it longer. Adding in digits and symbols does help, but lengthening helps much more.
(Jan 2008) If you're running Debian GNU/Linux on a VPS (such as virtuozzo) and you like living on the edge (i. e., run unstable), then you may have been bitten by bug #454638 after the latest libc6 upgrade (glibc 2.7). That is to say, dpkg aborts during the upgrade with Unknown error 530.
Don't panic!
And most of all, don't attempt to reboot the server! There is hope yet.
(Jun 2007) Ever wonder what happens if you turn on a computer while it is wet from morning dew?
(Apr 2007) This site has undergone some major internal changes recently. The codebase is now built by SCons instead of Cons, which, sadly, has met the fate of so many other open-source projects. Nevertheless, the best ideas in Cons live on in SCons, which is alive and well, and has many more cool features that Cons users have been missing out on. In the process, I've discovered that Python actually doesn't suck, as I had once thought. The so-called “whitespace thing” is actually rather convenient once you get used to it. I still love the occasional Perl one-liner (or more-than-one-liner as my scripts usually turn out to be), but Python has gained a new reputation in my book. Now, one of these days, I'm going to dive into Ruby. Ruby has much potential as a clean, powerful interpreted language.
In view of this change, this page is expected to undergo a major face-lift in the near future. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
(Mar 2007) If you want to know how to use UTF-8 with ncurses, read this:
(Oct 2006) Fixed some nasty XHTML non-compliance, some of which were due to a broken automated index generator. Hmph. So much for claiming XHTML compliance without actually checking it... ☺
(Aug 2006) Tidbit for X.org users: if, for whatever reason, you want to start an X server using an alternate configuration file, use:
/usr/bin/X -config filename …
If this doesn't meet your needs for some reason, you can also set the environment variable $XORGCONFIG to the alternate config file. I know this should be obvious, but I couldn't find it in the manpages.
(May 2006) The squirrels behind this site have created a handy tool called PolyML, that translates 7-bit ASCII transcriptions of various languages into UTF-8. The webmaster doesn't have (and doesn't want to install) software for inputting things like Ancient (Polytonic) Greek, or Русский, or [ðɪ ˌɪntəɹˈnɛːʃənəl fəˈnɛtɪk ˈɛlfəbɪt]. But with this tool, random snippets from various languages can be embedded in the text just by typing them in 7-bit ASCII, and applying a simple post-processing filter. For example, the squirrels type:
En archej^ e:^n ho lo'gos, kai` ho lo'gos e:^n pro`s to`n theo`n, kai` theo's e:^n ho lo'gos.
And out comes:
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεὸν, καὶ θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος.
The Russian squirrels type:
V nachalye b'jlo Clovo, i Clovo b'jlo u Boga, i Clovo b'jlo Bog.
And out comes:
В начале было Слово, и Слово было у Бога, и Слово было Бог.
Then the fanatical, uh, phonetical, squirrels type:
"In D@ bI'gInIN wAs D@ 'w@r\:d, "En D@ 'w@r\:d wAs wIT 'gA:d, "En D@ 'w@r\:d wAs 'gA:d.
And it sounds like:
ˌɪn ðə bɪˈgɪnɪŋ wɑs ðə ˈwəɹːd, ˌɛn ðə ˈwəɹːd wɑs wɪθ ˈgɑːd, ˌɛn ðə ˈwəɹːd wɑs ˈgɑːd.
(Of course, you will need to have the appropriate fonts for this to show up properly. But it's assumed that if you understood the output you'd already have the fonts for it.)
PolyML generates these different languages conveniently encapsulated in <span>'s with the classes greek, russian, or ipa; so if you wish, you can use CSS to style them easily. For example, you may wish to change the default font settings provided by the site's stylesheet.
Admittedly, PolyML uses unorthodox transcription schemes for these languages that will likely grate on the nerves of many people. This is the unfortunate side-effect of having to unambiguously represent the languages using only 7-bit ASCII (and also the unusual preferences of said squirrels).
Where can you get PolyML, you ask? Well, the squirrels are working on cleaning it up so that it's palatable to the rest of the world… Coming Real Soon Now(tm)! ☺
(Jan 2006) Introducing the 4D FAQ...
The auto-indexed pages (4D visualization and Tatari Faran grammar) now have more stable anchor ID's, based on the actual heading text rather than a non-descript number, thanks to new fixes to the static PHP code. This should be much better, as #-links shouldn't break quite as often as it would have before.
(Jan 2006) The 4D pages are now all generated by static PHP. They have also undergone a CSS facelift. Unfortunately, IE 6 and below are broken and do not respect max-width in CSS, so most people won't notice a difference. That's OK, I don't mind watching Microsoft play catch-up. ;-) After all, HTML is supposed to degrade gracefully. :-)
(Jan 2006) The 4D pages have been grafted into another part of this site. Most (all?) browsers should have no problems with this.
Also, PHP is now only used as a pre-processor if the page itself isn't dynamic. There's no reason to redundantly generate static pages, after all. Also, today I officially retract my statement about not wanting to be associated with PHP. :-)
(Dec 2005) This site is now being slowly ported to PHP. PHP is actually really nice for getting rid of annoyingly repetitious HTML code.
(Sep 2005) Eusebeîa now has an official logo!
(Sep 2005) Also, the borogoves have been working very hard to produce this interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky poem. (Warning: it is completely made up, as per Carroll's intentions, and contrary to his interpretations.)
(Aug 2005) My roommate is a bio-medical student. Here is one of his biological experiments. ;-)
(Aug 2005) Check out this collection of Rubik's-cube-like twisty puzzles.
(Mar 2005) The pages on 4D Visualization have been updated.
(Jan 2005) Interested in twisty puzzles like Rubik's cubes? Check out Mefferts' new Dogics! This is the ultimate twisty puzzle: a magic icosahedron!
I just received mine yesterday... it's very cool. It has 24 different planes of rotation, and 5 positions for each plane. There are 12 colors and 20 faces, with 5 pieces per color and 1 piece per face, for a whopping total of 80 pieces to arrange.
Available only for limited time; get one now for a special low price! Get it now even just for posterity! This may be the last production run of Dogics, so don't miss it.
(Oct 2004) Check out Yawn, the wacky command-line based TODO-list manager.
(Mar 2004) If you're interested in constructed languages, you might want to visit the Conlang Resources section of this site.
(Feb 2004) This site is running on a virtual collocated server from John Companies. If you want to know how to run Debian GNU/Linux on one of these colocated servers, you might be interested in these instructions for running a Debian chroot.
If you encounter any problems with some utilities (such as cp or install) not being able to modify timestamps of files while inside the Debian chroot, you might want to try this:
- From inside the Debian chroot:
dpkg-divert /bin/cpmv /bin/cp /bin/cp.distrib - From inside the Redhat root:
(Assuming that your Debian chroot is in /debian.)ln /bin/cp /debian/bin/cp
You may replace
installor any other binary in a similar manner. (Although you should be careful not to hardlink a binary that is linked against a library available only in the Redhat root, since the library will be inaccessible from inside the Debian chroot.)- From inside the Debian chroot:
