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It is interesting to note that "Playfair" is the name of a cryptosystem invented in 1854 and heavily used (and frequently broken) in World War I.
Varients were still in use (and still being broken) for low grade cyphers in World War II.

I would be very surprised if the developers of FairPlay and PlayFair were unaware of this link.

Speaking as somebody who does technical training for large companies (as detailed in my resume), your ``tenet that 'geeks should train geeks''' is less than ideal.

There are two things you want in any teacher:

1. someone who can teach;
2. and someone who knows the subject.

The actual teaching and delivery of a class is essentially a performance. A stand-up comic has to be constantly side-splittingly funny; a teacher has to be occasionally funny and educate the audience. Otherwise, there's not much difference.

A good teacher who doesn't know the subject is obviously (worse than) useless, but somebody who knows the subject but not how to teach is just as bad. You need the two together.

So what makes a good teacher? You've got to be on top of everything: you need to have absorbed the subject so thoroughly that you know it forwards and backwards, inside and out. You need to have that information extremely well organized so that you always know where you are in your own mental map.

When you've got that down, you'll probably also have the confidence that you need to bare your soul in front of a bunch of people. Humans grant authority to those with (percieved) confidence, and you need a great deal of authority to teach: you've got to control all those people.

Every teacher has had a number of different disruptive students. You need to know how to keep people focused on the subject at hand. Usually, this means letting people have their say, no matter how wacko, and using your normal conversational reply to ideally bring the thread back to earth--or, at least, steer it straight. Sometimes, you've got to be blunt: ``I'm sorry, Dave, but this is a class on the Internet, not on the dystopian perspective of the Romanovs. I wish we had the time to explore the Romanovs in more detail, but we've got to get through the dot-bomb in the next forty-five minutes, and we haven't even mentioned how the IPO hype brought in so many investors charged with what Alan Greenspan rightly called `irrational exuberance'....''

Every class has at least a couple students who close up into their shells. People don't learn when they're in their shells. Drawing them out is a challenge. How do you get somebody involved when they don't give you an opening? One very shy girl, I tossed her a real softball and she almost went into the foetal position....

There's a lot more I could go into--passion for the subject, honesty, knowing when to say, ``I don't know,'' and more. I haven't even touched on the preparation: how to make a lesson plan, design exercises and tests, grading, record-keeping, and a lot more. It's just like any other discipline: it takes a lot of time and hard work.

So, don't think that just because somebody is a geek like you and he knows his stuff that he'll make a good teacher. If he's got the archtypal geek personality, you want to avoid his class like the plague--he'll be the proverbial professor who talks in everybody else's sleep.

Cheers,

b&

I'm used to posting on the OpenBSD mailing lists, so my first response is do your homework!
(j/k)

how can putting living creatures (yeast) into a dish allow it to stay vegan?

vegan is "someone who eats no animal products at all", yeast is part of the fungus kingdom, not the animal kingdom. it would be the same as plucking fruit from a tree and eating it (in terms of being vegan, but if you really wanna get strict with your eating habits check out fruitarianism)

With regards to this site, i figured it would be relevant to point out the vegan aspect of that dish since it means there is no cholesterol in it, which might be of importance to those whose stereotypical meal consists of big macs[3,3] and pizza (well, the typical pizza. i really like Amy's vegetable pizza).
My recipe is also quite low fat and very high protein, by the way.

First a disclaimer: I'm unemployed right now (please check out my resume and hire me!) and driving a '68 VW camper. I can't afford a new car, but that hasn't stopped me from looking.

The Honda Insight is a fascinating car. It's as if Honda took every neat new technology they've been working on and crammed it in. Unfortunately, it's small--just a two-seater--and expensive--in the low $20Ks.

For that much money or less, you can get a Volkswagen with the TDI engine. The two-door VW TDIs (the Bug and the Golf) get better mileage than any other car sold in America except for the Insight. You can drive non-stop from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles on one tank of fuel, and that's a trip I personally would take at elast two days to drive. They're also among the least-polluting cars available, though there are cleaner ones out there. The Bug has (one of?) the highest safety ratings you'll find.

The catch? They're both turbocharged diesel engines. Wait! Don't run away! A diesel engine doesn't have to be the awful, smelly, polluting nightmare you're all thinking of. When properly engineered, as is the TDI, it's superior to gasoline:

• Proper fuel management, catalytic converters, filters, etc., can reduce emissions to well below the current average for the American fleet (the TDI makes use of every trick in the book in this regards).
• Diesel takes less energy to produce. Even if you get the same miles per gallon on diesel and gasoline, fewer barrels of oil were refined to make the diesel.
• Diesel fuel has more energy than gasoline. You can drive more miles on that gallon of diesel than on a gallon of gasoline.
• Diesel engines have much more torque than gasoline engines. Americans buy horsepower but drive torque. The Bug with the high-power gasoline engine will do 0-60 MPH faster than the diesel (but not by much) and has a higher top speed, but the diesel will easily beat the gasoline in 0-40.

But the real thing to do with one of these cars is run it off of biodiesel instead of petroleum-based diesel. Biodiesel is a high-cetane (the diesel version of octane) fuel made from vegetable oil. It's non-toxic; you could drizzle it over your salad...though it'd likely taste awful. The maufacturing process is very similar to the soap-making process; if you've ever made soap in your kitchen, you can make biodiesel in your kitchen. Biodiesel and petroleum-based diesel can be blended in any ratio desired simply by pouring them together.

The real advantage to biodiesel, however, is that every pound of carbon put into the atmosphere via the tailpipe had been previously removed from the atmosphere by the plant. No increased CO2! (Petroleum-based diesel pumps carbon from the ground and puts it into the air.) And, because the plant pulls more carbon out of the air for itself (instead of just its seeds), each pound of biodiesel results in a net decrease of atmospheric CO2.

In essence, biodiesel is the solar storage mechanism everybody keeps looking for. Run all those trains, trucks, and power plants from solar power (by way of corn and soy) and reduce dependence on oil all at the same time! All the infrastructure is already in place....

So, buy a car with a TDI engine, and you get incredible mileage and have the option of using either fuel you can find anywhere or a very environmentally-friendly fuel.

Now, if only somebody would give me a job, I'd go out and buy one....

b&

Quoth SpikyTux:

I wonder why there isn't any ISO images to download. I mean for someone who doesn't have credit card and live far away from North America, ISO images seems like the best alternative.

CD sales are a prime source of income for OpenBSD; you'll never see an official OpenBSD ISO image legally available for download.

Having said that, an ISO image really isn't necessary. You can download a floppy image and use that to do an install directly via FTP. Rather than ~600 Mbytes to transfer for an ISO, you'll only have to grab about 120 Mbytes for a full install.

More details can be found here.

Quoth Sits:

Only problem is that to upgrade the current uptime of 49 days is going to have to go...

If you like your uptime, have a look here.

b&

Quoth baywuulf:

I have an old Pentium 166 w/ 64MB and S3 virge video card lying around which I might use to play around with this stuff. Assuming no X Windows, will this be adequate to run OpenBSD without swapping to the harddrive much?

OpenBSD will run just fine on this computer. monk.trumpetpower.com is running on basically that same platform, and it's never given me a hint of trouble. Not that it or my DSL would likely survive a slashdotting, but....

My laptop is a Pentium 120 with 72 Mbytes RAM. I run Konqueror and Netscape under Windowmaker on it all the time. Sure, it's not a blazing speed daemon, but it's quite useable. And it's great to take onsite--I've got Apache, a DHCP server, lots more running on a machine I can tuck under my arm. I can max out a 100 Mbit Ethernet link with Apache, which actually makes the laptop a bit more convenient in some cases than a CD for transfering files.

b&