Stavros' Stuff

On programming and other things.

The Gallery

PERSONAL NOTE: It appears that Eva-Marie herself has read this page and commented here, which is quite awesome. Eva-Marie, if you ever read this again, e-mail me or something, don’t be a stranger :P

I like music. I listen to it all day. I listen to all kinds of music, classical, pop, rock, metal, whatever. Obviously, there many ingenious pieces, like the Swan Lake, Falling off the Edge of

Continue reading…

Hamachi

Since I’m no good at prologues, I will get right to the subject. I guess that was a prologue, though. Turns out I am a bit good at them. It wasn’t particularly good, but oh well, it serves its purpose. So, without further ado, I present to you… Hamachi!

Hamachi is “a zero-configuration virtual private networking application with an open security architecture and NAT-to

Continue reading…

Trashing Linux

Have you ever wondered what the joke answer to every Linux-related question (“rm -rf /”) actually does? You know it deletes everything, but have you ever seen it? Well, for your viewing pleasure, I have trashed my Ubuntu system. It wasn’t really what I expected it to be, nothing blew up. I won’t spoil it for you though, I’ll let you see for yourself. If the video runs a bit fast it’s because I’ve

Continue reading…

Webhost change

I just switched webhosts, I went with A small orange. I had heard many good things about them, and I reviewed their offerings. They offer everything FuitadNET does, but they have Ruby and Python support. I signed up for the small plan, which is $5/mo (I paid $7.5 at FuitadNET) but I have 400 MB of space and 10 GB of traffic per month (I only use about 150 and 1 respe

Continue reading…

Firefly

I just watched the last episode of Firefly, and I have to say, it is amazing. It is easily one of the best shows I have ever seen (together with Family Guy). If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you buy/rent/steal (I’m just kidding, I don’t think they rent it) and watch it immediately. Even if you don’t like that kind of shows (or any kind of show, or peo

Continue reading…

Allofmp3.com

When I visited Digg today I came upon this site, called Allofmp3. From it you can buy songs totally legally for as little as $0.02 per megabyte. They even have this cool service that encodes the files to whatever format you want (I recommend OGG Vorbis at Q6), so you end up paying about $3 for a whole CD (and not old ones or anything, they have almost

Continue reading…

An important day

Today was a very important day for me. I logged on to my site to reconfigure something, and I saw some new comments posted. When I read them, I couldn’t believe my eyes! I had my first flamer! I am posting the first comment below, for posterity:

Continue reading…

Petals Around the Rose

I stumbled upon a game today, it’s called Petals Around the Rose. It’s played with 5 dice, and you can only be told these three things about the game:

  1. The name of the game is significant.
  2. The number of petals comes from the dice, there’s only one answer for each roll and it’s either 0 or an even number.
  3. You can be told the number of petals after each roll.

Your goal is to figure

Continue reading…

Authentication

Some time ago I thought of an authentication scheme for website registration (or anything else) using asymmetric encryption, which went something like this (Alice is the user, Bob is the server):

  1. Alice signs up for an account and gives her public key to Bob.
  2. Bob stores it.
  3. When Alice wants to log on to Bob’s site, Bob sends her a random number of sufficient length, Alice signs it,

Continue reading…

Hard disk crash

OK, it’s like this: Originally I had one 80 GB disk, one 120 GB disk and a 160 GB one that stopped working three months after I bought it (damn Maxtor). Last week I got a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda so I’d finally have some space (all the other disks were full).

The new disk arrived, I ghosted the 80 one on the 250 (after quite a few crashes and hangs, which after a while stopped), and I installed t

Continue reading…