Month: December 2004

Categories
books

Debunking the debunkers

It’s very amusing that when you search for information about the da vinci code using google many of the hints are catholic or christian websites with information debunking the book. It’s amazing how much time and effort is currently being devoted to debunking Dan’s debunking of catholic and christian teachings. It’s reignited a millenia old debate. In his own way Brown has probably done many churches a power of good by forcing them to examine and succinctly state their beliefs. Without wanting to go into a huge debate on this topic I’m going to make 2 salient points:

  1. History IS written by the winners
  2. All historical records are incomplete in the same way that all stories are told subjectively

It’s a great pity then that many of the responses and da vinci debunks are absolute in their criticism. The authors are in possession of the absolute and correct interpretation of sacred texts, much like the gnostics they criticise. Examples of critics oversights include failure to acknowledge the potential veracity of St. Philips gospel description of Jesus and Mary Magdalene being companions and Jesus “kissing her on the mouth”. And less subjectively, all criticisms that I’ve seen so far fail to acknowledge the undeniable fact of the dimunition of women’s status in society and the clergy by christian religions. The other great pity of is that Brown himself has a powerful message of tolerance which is being missed in the righteous clamour to attack both the author and his very entertaining and thought provoking book. The spirit of The Inquistion lives on in the minds of those whose faith cannot stand query or criticism.

Categories
technology

Changing the administrator password on an NT/2k/XP box

A friend (honest) forgot their pwd recently and asked me to hack into their machine and change their admin pwd. I found the following really tasty application which does the trick.
The Offline Password and NT registry editor by Petter Nordahl-Haggen. This is a very useful utility which I’ve used in the past and which has proven very effective. There are bootable floppy and CD images on the site that you can use edit your windoze box’s passwords, stored in the reg’s SAM file. For more hints and tips check here. Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone…

Categories
books

da vinci code

Not going to post a review of the book yet but I solved the second puzzle riddles @ dan brown’s website so I’ll post those for my mates so they can check their answers against mine.

  1. the mona lisa
  2. paris (louvre museum)
  3. the priory of sion (although they SHOULD accept priori de sion aswell 😉
  4. kryptos (friend of mine told me about this. it’s a sculpture in the garden of the CIA headquarters in langley, virginia)
  5. WW (look at the previous link)
  6. is there no help for the widows son (masonic phrase)
  7. masons (obviously enough)
  8. e pluribus unum which means “out of many, one” and is located on the great seal of the US(stumped me for a while until I remembered some of the masonic symbols on the dollar bill, the founding fathers could have formed their own lodge :-D)
  9. click her right eye (your left) as droit means right in french

So there you go treasure hunters. Gee, I loved that book. One of the most exciting and entertaining reads in a long time. Coincidentally (if you believe in such things) I read a book called The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio just before I read the Da Vinci Code. The result of all this was that I was well primed for the 1st few clues. Especially the crime scene sequence and the bank account number based on the fibonacci series. Still, great book.

Categories
technology

p2(very small)p

This is getting ridiculous. Following my recent post about Ed Shelton’s P2P program in 15 lines of Perl there’s been a P2P app done in 9 lines of Perl and now (wait for it) a full peer-2-peer application in 6 lines of Ruby with a 3 lines of comments.
Just to show everybody how nuts this has become the code is reproduced below…
# Server: ruby p2p.rb password server server-uri merge-servers
# Sample: ruby p2p.rb foobar server druby://localhost:1337 druby://foo.bar:1337
# Client: ruby p2p.rb password client server-uri download-pattern
# Sample: ruby p2p.rb foobar client druby://localhost:1337 *.rb
require'drb';F,D,C,P,M,U,*O=File,Class,Dir,*ARGV;def s(p)F.split(p[/[^|].*/])[-1
]end;def c(u);DRbObject.new((),u)end;def x(u)[P,u].hash;end;M=="client"&&c(U).f(
x(U)).each{|n|p,c=x(n),c(n);(c.f(p,O[0],0).map{|f|s f}-D["*"]).each{|f|F.open(f,
"w"){|o|o<<c.f(p,f,1)}}}||(DRb.start_service U,C.new{def f(c,a=[],t=2)c==x(U)&&(
t==0&&D[s(a)]||t==1&&F.read(s(a))||p(a))end;def y()(p(U)+p).each{|u|c(u).f(x(u),
p(U))rescue()};self;end;private;def p(x=[]);O.push(*x).uniq!;O;end}.new.y;sleep)
I think I’ve had more than enough of this. Pick a suitably high-level language, use single character variable names and some whacky formatting to exchange a file over a socket and call it P2P. Next someone is gonna write a java programme using SUN’s JXTA that just inits a class or two, format it all on about 4 lines and say, wow it’s the shortest P2P app ever… More interesting would be a P2P application written in a declarative language like Prolog or a functional language like Haskell or Hope. Haven’t done much Haskell programming in a while (damn rusty and for some reason don’t feel like breaking out the books) but prolog looks tempting. Expect a post. I may have to use some file IO/socket programming but it sounds like an interesting project. I’ll let readers know how I get on 😉