Slightly Unstable

Two days ago I decided to take the plunge and switch from Linux Mint 5.0 (Elyssa) to something more current. In my search I found out about Arch. Arch is based on its own package manager (Pacman) and offers up new unmodified applications as they were meant to be used. After downloading the rather small ISO (150 MB!) and burning it to a CD-R I was ready to roll. Rather that using a simple installer it drops you down into a text based installer with multiple options. Partitioning, Setting default repositories, Selecting base packages and other customizations are done from the installer.

I am in the process of moving so I may be away from the web for a bit.

I decided to open up blogging to the public. Now anybody who registers will get a blog and their posts will show up on the front page. You can see a list of the blogs on the right, but before you show up on the list you have to write at least one blog post. To write in your blog click the Post Blog Entry link in the red bar.

So today I learned about Cron. Cron is a way to schedule tasks to be completed automatically in Unix like operating systems. By editing one file you can schedule tasks to be completed by a specific user on a minute - weekly basis. I wanted to bug my sister so I added the following lines to /etc/crontab (Click for more)

All set for daisho and i have 27 bottles of Faygo

Due to stock changes constantly at the main and only supplier, i kinda didnt follow the poll. however i did get plenty to scatter around the con and give to room parties.

the stock is 6 Moon Mists, 6 Redpops, 5 Grapes, 5 Twists, 2 Root Beers, 2 Oranges, and 1 Cola.

I am writing this in response to Harley's latest post. I believe not having a President who has all the powers is a good thing. I don't want any president to have all the power. We have Separation of Powers to prevent us from becoming a dictatorship. And yes people look out for special interests but that doesn't mean nothing gets done. When a particular party decides to do something most members of that party normally go along. By the way I don't believe people who have the chance to vote and don't should be allowed to complain.

As Obama won the latest election it gave his supporters hope. However, does this election really matter when the president has to ask the congress for permission to do anything like a child in elementary school?

I saw Germ's earlier post about using /dev/urandom to make a big text file and I was wondering if I could use the same command for something useful like generate passwords. I asked in the #lugradio channel on the Freenode IRC server and I was told that if I use the fallowing command to make passwords.

Mez created a bash script using urandom to make passwords.

To install it use the following commands

cd /usr/bin

sudo wget http://slightlyunstable.org/files/genpwd

So I have some serious questions about the whole "mech" phenomenon. By that I mean shows like Gundam, Full Metal Panic, etc. So heres's my questions. To better qualify here is a picture of the kind of mechs I am talking about.

I was bored yesterday so I decided to mess around with the command line. Found out about /dev/urandom. Urandom is a true random number generator that works by collecting noise and gibberish from device drivers. So what happens if you try and read this data?
This..

cat /dev/urandom

This is a TINY sample of what random data you receive in less than 1 second.