I bug has been confirmed where Feisty and Gutsy versions of Ubuntu are allowing hard drives to spin down to conserve power and causing excessive wear. In short a drive has an average number of load/unload cycles before it wears out. If the drive isn’t allowed to spin down during use, then there are less load/unload cycles which extends it’s life. It’s not clear whether desktops are affected or not since it’s the Advanced Power Management that is allowing the drive to spin down, and thus extending battery life. I’m not sure why one would put trust into a “Mechanical”
Hard disk Drive to archive data, so as long as you make frequent backups it shouldn’t be a huge deal. But it’s nice to be aware that your Hard disk may not last as long as one would expect.

Just ran across this post and found it interesting since there are many people who use torrents. It seems that Comcast isn’t playing nice and is blocking people from seeding torrents. There are a few workarounds however, one of which is changing your ISP completely. If I had Comcast I would definitely be switching, and not recommending them to others. And I will switch from Verizon, if they decide to pull this shit on us, or decided to filter any traffic at all that is wanted. But what happens when all ISP’s decide to filter traffic? Maybe it would be time to get out of the internet realm altogether and say fuck it, I will do my banking over the telephone, and pay my bills via snail mail. Naahh, I don’t think that could ever happen. Or could it?

This has got to be one of the best documentaries I have seen in a long time. Although I am a fool for conspiracy theories, I eat them up like there is no tomorrow, but this is a fair movie. More than anything the movie was educational and informative. Katy rented this movie on netflix, but I’m sure you could find this movie elsewhere if you looked hard enough. Please don’t turn this movie down if get the chance, it was #7 on the Nielsen Top 10 Box office Documentaries for 2006. I find this impressive since the movie was limited release at the box office. I never heard it was going to be in the theaters, did you? Also on IMDB it is rated a 7.6 out of 10 with ~1300 votes. Definately check this movie out if you get a chance! Also for your humor check this out for a good laugh Driver’s License Prank

The University of Washington Computer Science Course, C590 Advanced Cryptography, is available online. They offer the assignments, solutions, all the lecture videos, quizzes, etc, on their website. The content is pretty good and would only recommend it to the more advanced audience. Get the content while it’s available!! I’m downloading all of it as I’m writing this post. Get it here:

Course Intro and Assignments

Lectures in MP3 format and WMV format

Download Entire Handbook of Applied Cryptography here

Sample Cryptography Implementations

Most barcodes in the US are 12-digit UPC barcodes, with ten digits at the bottom of the code and one small number to each side. Impress your friends by asking them to select a random item from the kitchen with a removable label and cut the numbers off of the UPC barcode; you can then proceed to read the numbers encoded in the lines.

Steps:

1. Note that barcodes are made up of both black and white lines. The white spaces in between the black lines are part of the code.

2. Understand that there are four different thicknesses to the lines. Henceforth, the skinniest line will be referred to as “1,” the medium-sized line as “2,” the next largest line as “3.” and the thickest is “4.”
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