Saturday, November 11, 2006

SpeedUp your FireFox


1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return.

Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows: (by double clicking them)

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once. (I changed mine to 100, works great)

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives

Friday, September 22, 2006

Enigma


Enigma was a portable cipher machine used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. More precisely, Enigma was a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines — comprising a variety of different models.

The Enigma was used commercially from the early 1920s on, and was also adopted by the military and governmental services of a number of nations — most famously by Nazi Germany before and during World War II.

The German military model, the Wehrmacht Enigma, is the version most commonly discussed. The machine has gained notoriety because Allied cryptologists were able to decrypt a large number of messages that had been enciphered on the machine. The intelligence gained through this source — codenamed ULTRA — was a significant aid to the Allied war effort. The exact influence of ULTRA is debated, but a typical assessment is that the end of the European war was hastened by two years because of the decryption of German ciphers.

Although the Enigma cipher has cryptographic weaknesses, it was, in practice, only their combination with other significant factors which allowed codebreakers to read messages: mistakes by operators, procedural flaws, and the occasional captured machine or codebook.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Colossus shaped History


British built the Colossus machine, which translated German teletype code during World War II, it took the Allies up to six hours to decode a message and a day or more to pore over intelligence, draw conclusions, and pass along information to military command. After Colossus, the Allies gained a picture of German military activity across the English Channel as the day unfolded--intelligence that gave Gen. Dwight Eisenhower the confidence to launch the D-Day invasion.
Colossus was built in 1944 to perform Boolean operations on a paper data tape that streamed through the machine at 30 miles an hour. Its logic was literally wired into the machine. It is, perhaps, the greatest software that never got written.
Colossus transformed a drawn-out mechanical process into electronics--it was an early computer--and provided a useful service by accelerating coded teletype translation. Colossus shaped history.