Nigia found that CPU and RAM of Spartacus are okay. But the Shuttle AK39N is dead. Now, he ordered a MSI board. Let's hope for the best and be prepared for the worst, as usual.

A tip to check for weak encryption

This is a short empiric tip from my experience, while I worked for a security company: if you have an encrypted file, and you are able to compress it at 75% of its initial size, you probably have an XOR crypted file, with a short key. If you read on literature how to crack a Vigenere, you will be able to crack a XOR, too; because they are the same. The fact that you can compress indicates that there is still much redundancy. Ciphertext generated by good ciphers never compress!

Little trouble with OpenOffice and Excel

OpenOffice 1.1 has a very powerful export function to create PDF. A bug I found in both OpenOffice and Excel is that they cannot create 3D graphs, if the numbers you are using are below 1. This happens if you want to plot probabilities for example. OpenOffice and Excel, they simply trunc the decimal part while plotting the graph!

News for GPU: Welcome to Iran, Brasil, Malaysia