Category computers

I just had an interesting idea:

You all know that random number generators are not truely random, as they generally get their input from something that could theoretically be predicted (temperature, radio background noise, etc).

I think it would be interesting to see if a person could be used as a random number generator. The data could be fairly easily gathered by sitting a person down at a speech recognition device that will respond to ‘one’ and ‘zero’ or ‘yes’ and ‘no’, recording them as bits in a key. If the person were to rattle off 1024 yes/no or one/zero answers, then you would have a 1k key. My presumption is that if you told a person to randomly pick one of the possible answers, they would tend to get fairly random after a while. But, it would be interesting to see. Standard tools for analyzing randomness of data could be used to see just how truely random the person is. It wouldn’t be hard to collect a number of high-bit samples from an individual, nor would it be difficult to collect samples from any number of people, allowing for proper analysis of a human-based random number generator. It’d also be an especially geeky way to generate PGP/GPG keys.

I think the whole world needs to use 10-digit dialing. The 248 area code almost got it right, as you need full the full 10 digits for local calls, but you still need to dial a 1 for inter-lata and interstate long distance. Why can’t the phone companies just tell people to suck it up and use full 10-digit dialing (without a +1, ever) for all calls everywhere? Just like cell phones, it’d work great. The only reason I can think of is that then people won’t know precisely if a call is long distance or not, but I’m sure an automated “Enter the number you want to call and we’ll tell you the rate” service could be set up.

This afternoon and I are supposed to go war driving around the Detroit area. I’m just putting the finishing touches on the notebook for logging everything. I’m getting Ethereal (a wonder packet capture/analyizer program) going, so Kismet can log to it via Wiretap. After this all I’ll go clear out my car, hook everything up, then head down to the prearranged meeting place. < giggle >

Ethereal is compiling away in the background, and empty bowl of Raisin Bran is sitting next to me, and some random programming from FoodTV is coming off the TV. I think I’ll go change the channel. You know, I really hate waiting for software to compile. It’s the best way to do things, though, I guess… Oh well…

Does anyone have a spare, two channel PCI IDE controller? I don’t care what speed it is, but DMA66 or DMA100 would be nice. I think mine is dead… I keep getting timeout errors when reading a certain part of a drive while in multi-user mode under FreeBSD. I wish I knew what was wrong, but when the drive times out, the whole box hangs. It’s irritating. I don’t like having to walk downstairs to reset my file server all the time.