Scary fundamentalism

Mark TwainPerusing Scientific American, February 2002. Yes, I admit I’m a bit behind with my reading… But I do not suspect the information is invalid due to the passage of a few years. Before the neo-con equivalent of the mutawa have all back issues burned and all references made illegal it is worth recording what is presented.
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MD5 Hashes – Part 2

Padlock

MD5 Encryption?

It’s been a while since I wrote the first part of this MD5 article . Here in Part 2 I’m not (yet) going to cover the subject of hash collisions… That will follow in another future part.
Just now I want to deal with the pervasive, but wrong, belief that MD5 (or any of the other hashes commonly used, e.g. SHA1) are, of themselves, a means of encrypting data. They are not. However they often, at first glance, look like they are being used as such under some circumstances. This is a widely held misunderstanding and needs to be corrected.
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Ruby on Rails. On Ubuntu.

Ruby on Rails logoHere’s how to do it.

I had a Ubuntu box running 6.06 (Dapper) and a vanilla install of Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL5. I wanted to dabble in Ruby on Rails using the same box, but not affect the “production” side of it.

Despite the normally trivially easy install of software on Ubuntu I banged my head against a wall for hours trying to get it working… I just could not find a simple and complete example. I know I’ll probably find that some clever clogs can reduce all of this to 5 keystrokes, but I couldn’t. So this is a complete and detailed walk-through of how to get Ruby on Rails running on an existing Ubuntu server.

My definition of success was to have a noddy “Hello World” running on a URL such as http://192.168.0.4:3000 while http://192.168.0.4/ continued to run my normal media server (i.e. via port 80) I want complete independence between then. Here goes…

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