• Conclave Protocol Design Overview

    Conclave works on a trusted-Trent system. In the secured-channel protocol design of Conclave, a bot, which we will name Trent, becomes the distributor of a group of chatters’s symmetric key. When a user on IRC (we will name her Alice) wishes to gain access to a group’s symmetric key (we will use #Talk), she tells Trent who she is and asks for #Talk’s key, encrypted to her by her public key, say 0xABCDEFAB.
  • Formatting Email Replies

    Purpose When one is new to the system of email, and hasn’t spent a lot of time conversing with others via mailing lists and such, one may not know the customs and standards for formatting email replies. This document will try to help the reader learn certain techniques and customs to apply when writing email replies. Writing good email replies is just as important as having good grammar and spelling; it helps the reader keep track of the discussion with greater ease.
  • FreeBSD NIS servers with GlibC (Linux) clients

    Introduction The following are some tips on getting FreeBSD NIS servers to work with GlibC (GNU/Linux) clients. Getting them working took me several hours, and a lot of Google searching. If I’ve forgotten something, or have a pointer I should include, drop me a line. The systems I was working with were: FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p2 RedHat 8.0 (glibc-2.2.93-5) On the server (FreeBSD) side First of all, I should state that the ypserv environment I was dealing with was non-standard.
  • How This Website is Created (old)

    You might have noticed how this website maintains a standard-looking appearance throughout it, and might be wondering how I maintain this template-ish format. The answer for me did not lie in writing PHP, Perl, using databases, or using complicated Apache modules to achieve this effect. It’s all done fairly simply with Server Side Includes (SSI’s). A poster on Slashdot suggested the method I’m using: separate the content from the surrounding information.
  • Information Spread

    Introduction This article gives the best argument I can currently give for the concept of free information spread. This is a very emotional writing for me to make; I must confess that some of the conclusions I arrive at often times seem troublesome to even me, let alone the general public. However, I can currently prevent myself from going mad about the moral issues by remembering that we are undergoing a societal revolution, and many cherished beliefs will be challenged.
  • My Pine and Maildir Story

    In this article I’m going to be long-winded and describe my story. If you want to skip straight to the solution summary, I won’t hold it against you :) The Problem So, you want to use Pine with maildir, eh? You’ve heard a lot of good things about maildir, and want to move from using your local mbox files to maildir. You’ve even already already converted your mbox to maildir using scripts that are available.