Soo, I feel that my blog hasn't been getting the attention it deserves, particularly from me.
To fix this, I will shut it down.
The cool people I know can find me on Facebook.
The rest of my site will be available for fun stuff, or such.

So I've been using VMWare to virtually dualboot my laptop, so that I could boot into Linux while still running Windows. Well, one fine Saturday morning, I forgot to tell Grub to boot Linux, and so it happily booted Windows from the same partition that it was already running on.
I'm like, oh badness, and shut down the virtual Windows and schedule the real Windows to run chkdsk on next boot. It finds a few problems and boots up successfully. Then I discovered that my graphics were unaccelerated, my mouse is glitchy, I have no network devices or USB mass storage support, and my system will blue screen after one minute.

I decided that day would be a good day to reinstall Windows.

So, I thought of a way to use GPG keys to authenticate to webpages! A webpage would have a copy of a person's public key. A person would enter their username, click Next for the webpage to select the correct public key, and then it would generate a long string of random text, which would be encrypted with the person's public key and displayed on the login page. A textfield would be shown, which the person would enter the unecrypted text. This random text would be generated on every page view, and the form would contain a text id, which would be linked to a database field that is used to verify the unencrypted text. For extra security, or compression purposes, a SHA256 hash could be applied via Javascript on the unencrypted text before it is submitted, and the PHP could verify this on the server side.
Most of the GPG software supports decrypting clipboard contents. The only real challenges are getting more people to use GPG keys and finding server-side GPG software.
I think this is the same type of system that SSH uses for public-key authentication, except less automatic. Perhaps eventually, this system may become standard for web authentication? That'd be fun!

Wikipe-tan is the nweest cuteness thing that I have discovered! Is adorable!

I recently started playing Starcraft a little bit, and we set up a little Ventrilo server to talk between the rooms of our dorm building. I hit upon the brilliant idea of hosting a permanent Ventrilo server on my Linux desktop for everybody to use, but my exciting plans were quickly demolished by the artificial limit of 8 users per server.
So, I googled for an opensource clone of Ventrilo and found Mumble! This program is even provided as a deb package from Ubuntu! I've heard that it's much better than Teamspeak, and comparable to Ventrillo. However, there's no built-in limit to users, and so I have my server set at a max of 5000 users, which all of the students of MSOE will not be able to fill.
And if they do, then my munin plugin will tell me when I'm getting close!

I posted a new sound and program, of mild interest.

When I took Psych 1001, our lecturer told us a story of a patient in NYC with a history of talking to the voices in his/her head. Patient (not of said lecturer) went to therapist for help with said voices. Patient was otherwise "normal", had traditional job, paid bills, lived independently, etc... But of course had a hard time fitting in while talking to voices.

Therapist suggested patient buy a used cell phone, and talk into phone (without turning it on or calling anyone) whenever the need arose to talk to the voices. It worked well, since of course society generally considers it normal to talk into cell phones.

Except the patient was also using it on the subway, where signals are apparently very hard to get. Other passengers asked the patient what service he/she was using that had usable signal down there.

From a Slashdot comment

I discovered the web comic with too many words, Subnormality, and as I read through it, I discovered a picture of the Atheist Apocalypse. I hope for this future to come.

Goodbye dear Constitution, only 6 days after celebrating you.

"And just think, little boys and girls! Someday, you might get rich and be able to buy your very own senator! He'll let you do whatever you want! Won't that be FUN?"