Charles Haddon Spurgeon is famous for being a Baptist preacher in the 19th century (1834-92). But more interesting than his career of regularly preaching to 10,000+ congregants is how he lived his life outside of ‘merely’ preaching the Bible. Charles was born in Kelvedon, Essex, England on 19 June 1834 as both the son and …
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Author:warren
internet radio
The name’s something of a misnomer, but internet radio is very cool. As a way to listen to a wide variety of music without actually using a radio – and therefore having more choice over what you listen to – internet radio is great. I regularly use Winamp, iTunes, and Windows Media Player to listen …
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Prayer: The Nuclear Option
Prayer is lots of things to the Christian. It’s our communication line to God. It’s our way of providing support to other Christians. It’s also what some have called the ‘weapon of last resort’. Christ has called us to pray for our enemies. He rebuked His disciples for wanting to call down fire on folks …
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Prayer: Tactical Support to the Front Lines
To quote Paul, we are to be “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints” [Eph 6:18]. As Christians in the world, we are engaged in a constant battle against evil. We are fighting daily to hold …
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Prayer: The Comm Link to God
I know what many who read this will think: duh! We’re told repeatedly in the Bible to pray to God. The model prayer given to us by Jesus begins with “Our Father Who art in heaven”. Jesus prayed to His Father a lot, and as “little christs”, we should be mimicking that example. The real …
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Why do atheists care?
Atheism is a belief that there is no god. Contrasted with agnosticism, the belief that we can’t know whether or not there is a god, atheism is predicated upon a basic belief held by others that there is a god. Interestingly, though, many atheists take great pains to attempt to prove their beliefs. Some say …
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RIFd by RFID
My title today is a compact pair of acronyms. From a presentation I saw this week on WalMart’s investments in RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies as a cost-savings measure, they expect to be able to save around $6.7b dollars annually in salary expenditures by moving to RFID tags and scanners to reduce theft and ease …
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Why ‘6 days’ is essential
It is essential for anyone claiming to be a Christian to believe in a literal 6-day creation timeline. Upon that basis rests the entirety of God’s revealed word in the Bible. My employer has recently added a page defending evolution on its website, and I am very disappointed in that move. Evolution cannot speak to …
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PT Cruiser and other cars
Jay Loden has an interesting journal entry from yesterday (1 Dec 05). Apparently, while in Seattle on a buiness trip, he had the, ahem, priviledge of driving a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I have driven them on a few occasions in the past when I worked for Hertz, and generally agree with him about the layout …
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A response to Dan Edelen
Before going any further, let me state the fact that I was home-schooled. For all 12 years of grade-, middle-, and high-school. My parents had various reasons for doing this, from the horrible state of the public schools in Albany NY at the time to wanting to be more involved in my education, but I …
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Memorial for Uncle Don
Reprinted from The Saratogian Donald J. Neilson, 80, a resident of Mowry Avenue in Greenwich, died Tuesday, 6 Sep 2005, at Glens Falls Hospital. Born 4 Oct 1924, in the town of Easton, he was the son of Edwin and Bessie Hagadorn Neilson. He retired from Hollingsworth and Vose Paper Co. in Center Falls and …
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Memorial for Aunt Anne
Reprinted from the Post Star: Amaryllis “Anne” Locke, 75, of state Route 9, South Glens Falls, died Friday, June 10, 2005, at Glens Falls Hospital. Amaryllis was born Dec. 10, 1929, to Edwin and Bessie (Hagadorn) Neilson, in the dining room of her parents’ home on Windy Hill Road, in the town of Easton. She …
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A way around the rotational issue
Haha! My roommate pointed out on Saturday that a bit-wise rotation is just like shifting a value X bits, and or-ing it with the same value shifted the opposite direction (word size)-X bits. For example: A = (A << 7) | (a >> 25) for a 32-bit variable. This means I can, in fact, perform …
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Wolf1 almost done, and Wolf2 proposed
I have been working on finishing the imlpementation of my first one-way hash algorithm, named Wolf1. Over the weekend, I devised a second algorithm, aptly named Wolf2, which will be debuting on my website at the same time Wolf1 appears. The general form for Wolf1 is as follows: Wolf1 is a 256-bit one-way hash algorithm, …
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More hashing stuff
Last night I went through Knuth’s books and converted some of the provided constants into hexadecimal values. I then snagged 32 32-bit numbers and have used them as the initial constants in my new hash algorithm. Wolf1 provides a 256-bit signature, after performing several cascading and avalanching activities on the blocks read in. These operations …
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First hashing follow-up
In speaking with one of my professors this afternoon, and in re-reading the one-way hash chapter in Bruce Schneier’s excellent book Applied Cryptography, I’ve discovered that the only reasonable way of writing my hashing algorithm is to stick to chunks that are register-sized, or at most the size of all of the available registers (4 …
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Some open questions about hashing
I have been working on several one-way hash algorithms over the past couple weeks. None of them have yet reached the stage of ‘wow this really looks cool’, but the most recent iteration has gotten me pretty close. Now I’m looking at how to implement it in software. The algorithm I designed can create any …
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