So most of you know that before Nerdy and the Greek got ahold of me, I was an MBA student here. The group that I was in for my leadership class had a presentation today. We were supposed to give a workshop on "Discrimination in the Workplace and How to Prevent It."

My team wanted to do a Jeopardy style game as part of this presentation. Being the token nerd in the class, my job was to implement the game.

See it here in all its glory: http://lug.wsu.edu/~ben/jeopardy/

So I have a small project that I started a while back (and I mean a while) which allowed distributed brute force cracking of unix shadow passwords hashed with MD5. It is written in C and ran using MPICH 1, required a dedicated cluster and was rather not optimized. I'm planning on sitting down here soon to work on it with the following:

• Optimise the hash generator (currently slow)
• Make the source character table more easily modifable
• Enable generated hashes to save to a lookup table for future use

I often run into a situations where I need to do simple numerical calculations on large blocks of text. Or, I would just like to do a calculation and have the result added to the file I'm working on. One way to deal with these situations is to process them with Perl.

"I don't know Perl", you might be saying. Well, if you have used search/replace in Vim, you know more Perl than you think. And the template below is easy to modify for common situations.

The "less" text file viewer is great for vi users. But wouldn't is be great if it had syntax highlighting too? With vim's "less" macro, it can.

Search commands with less are identical to vi. Also, most of the vi movement commands are built in, with a few extra shortcuts, like:

gg - Begining of file
G - end of file
ctrl-g - file info
99% - go to 99th percent of file
f / ctrl-f - forward one screen
b / ctrl-b - back one screen
u / ctrl-u - forward 1/2 screen
d / ctrl-d - backward 1/2 screen

So most of you should know this, and if you don't, well what are we going to do with you?... But The Nerdy and the Greek event took place last night. This week consisted of many long nights and last minute errunds, I don't believe Ben, Loren and maybe the matts, got any sleep thursday night. I know I left at 4am andd they were still working on things. Power to ya guys.