User talk:Lunkwill

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[edit] Welcome

(Thanks for fixing my grammar. :) --arenhaus)

[edit] Crypto diagrams

Hey, nice work on the crypto diagrams. I was meaning to ask you for a feistel one, and you beat me to it. Tell me, what program are you using to draw them? -- Finlay McWalter 23:09, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! I was kind of hoping somebody would notice. I used OpenOffice 1.1's drawing program, which worked great. I just uploaded the originals: Media:Crypto_diagrams.tgz. All of it's for my security class: http://students.cs.byu.edu/~cs465ta/ - maybe if I end up teaching for a long time, all this can eventually be expanded into a free textbook. Lunkwill 18:10, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Great. I just tried it (subtle font-substition problems on windows, but nothing so serious that I'm going to actually bother to fix). Perhaps a link from the description pages to the .tgz is appropriate? -- Finlay McWalter 20:12, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Done. Lunkwill 03:18, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I second that - really nice work! Especially the highlighting of the garbled bits (which is a lot clearer than other expositions I've seen) and the ECB encrypted Tux - the best exposition I've ever seen on the subject. I've listed it on "Wikipedia:Featured pictures" Securiger 08:12, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! It's one of my favorite demos, too. My advisor saw it at a conference somewhere; I'd love to find the original source and credit him/her. Lunkwill 23:39, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Cryptography

Hello, just a quick note to invite you to Wikipedia:WikiProject Cryptography! — Matt 17:42, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Crypto diagrams

Hello, thanks for adding the "encrypted" Tux picture. That reminded me to ask if you had PNG or GIF versions of some of your diagrams that are currently in JPEG format? The reason is that looking at Image:Cbc decryption.jpg, you can make out small compression artifacts that make the picture look a little fuzzy. A non-lossy compression format (like PNG or GIF) would fix that. — Matt 05:47, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Image:Crypto diagrams.tgz now has .PNGs of most of the diagrams, including the Feistel network. They're not as big as I remember, but I originally went with .jpg since they came out smaller(!). Feel free to switch to the .PNGs if you prefer them. Lunkwill 06:40, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I don't suppose you could email me this? It seems there's a weird bug; only the old version is downloadable! [my address is matt_crypto <at> yahoo.co.uk] Cheers, — Matt 07:09, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
OK, bug automagically fixed itself; I've got the file. — Matt 07:10, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Thanks, I've PNG-ised these, and they look quite a lot better (to me, anyway!) — "cbc decryption.png" was missing; I don't suppose that's easily available, for completeness?— Matt 07:28, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Unfortunately, I accidentally overwrote the Openoffice drawing with the modification attack. But now that I look, you're in luck -- I do have a .png of it. I'll add it to the .tgz and Modes page. Lunkwill 16:19, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Thanks! — Matt 22:38, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] WikiReader Cryptography

Hello, this is a quick note to let you know about the WikiReader in Cryptography; I don't know if you'd be interested in this project, but the idea is to work towards a printable selection of articles in cryptography. There's now a provisional Table of Contents to work with, and for the next 68 days or so there'll be an "Article of the Day" scheme: each day there'll be a particular article highlighted for reviewing and fixing. There's two templates for this purpose: Template:WikiReaderCryptographyAOTD and Template:WikiReaderCryptographyAOTD-Verbose. The smaller one looks like this:

WikiReader Cryptography — article of the day edit
 MRR
Sunday, 24 July Playfair cipher (Talk) (History)
                   
Monday, 25 July Message authentication code (Talk) (History)
                   
Tuesday, 26 July Digital signature (Talk) (History)
                   
Wednesday, 27 July Block cipher modes of operation (Talk) (History)
                   
Thursday, 28 July Export of cryptography (Talk) (History)
                   
Notes: If you find problems that you can't fix (or it's too much effort), it would be very helpful if you could place a note on the Talk: page. Articles need to be checked for 1) Accuracy (Factchecking: Are there any mistakes? Is the writing precise? Are sources cited?), 2) Completeness (Any obvious omissions? Does it need illustration?) 3) Quality of writing (Copyedits: Grammar and spelling, phrasing, structure) 4) Neutrality (Is it written from the NPOV? Do we document all relevant points of view?) — Thanks!
Image:Evolution-tasks-old.png — To-do list for Digital signature [1]
  • Describe cryptanalysis of digital signatures -- what are the various notions of security for a signature scheme?
  • Mention the common association of message encryption with digital signatures.
(See all to-do lists for this WikiReader)

These articles are likely to be some of the earliest English Wikipedia content to get turned into a print version, and any help in making them as good as possible would be much appreciated. Thanks! — Matt 02:11, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I've replied to Wikipedia_talk:WikiReader/Cryptography#AOTD_needs_updated and reactivated the AOTD box. — Matt 13:59, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] antelope photos

The 4 photos you took of antelope and put in the gazelle page were actually of oryx and eland. I have taken them down, but the oryx one is good for that article and I plan to do a piece on eland so I'll use them for that (when I get round to it! I am trying to do too much round here) sunbird 22:37, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! It's been bugging me a long time that I wasn't sure what they were. I even did a bunch of image searches, but never fully straightened it out. I took a bunch of pictures at the safari; feel free to use any additional ones: http://lunkwill.org/pics/austin/0thumbs.html Lunkwill 22:40, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
No problem. The Oryx picture now dominates the East African Oryx arcticle. I don't recognise the species of deer in the taxobox, the antlers are growing in so it's hard to use them. Where did you take it? I'll use the others as time allows, busy busy! sunbird 23:00, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
There's a drive-through safari in San Antonio; lots of fun. Lunkwill 23:13, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Hey, we met at Crypto 2003

Hey Jason, this is Derek Williams. I recall we met at Crypto 2003 at the crypto teachers bof session and had planned on doing some sort of online repository of crypto stuff. Sorry that ended up not working out. The guy who was doing most of the work on our end later ended up dropping out of school to work as a software developer somewhere in New England. I've since moved on to the University of Waterloo. I take from your user page that you're still with BYU? How are things? CryptoDerk 05:44, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, that never really took off. I'm doing great, working on a Ph.D. and doing lots of crypto/credential stuff. How about you? Neat to see this cryptography reader taking off, eh? Lunkwill 22:27, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Exponential growth

In mathematics, a number that grows exponentially is one that grows at a rate proportional to its size. That is, the larger the number gets, the faster it grows.

The second sentence above, which you added, is not only incorrect, but highly misleading. A major point of this article is to dispell popular misunderstandings of this concept. "A is proportional to B" does not mean simply that as A gets bigger, so does B. Proportionality is a precisely defined concept and this present context is just the sort of place where that precision is absolutely essential.

I also think your allowance example takes too long for those introductory paragraphs; if it is to be included, it should appear much later in the article. Michael Hardy 01:41, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I don't mind precision, but a definition in terms of diff-eq loses a lot of our audience. Positive exponents > 1 with positive bases is the most common case people run into IMHO, and in that case, I believe my generalization is correct. I don't mind the allowance example being moved out of the intro, but I think it's important to give the reader a good intuition of the concept in the intro (perhaps with caveats that explain that the precise definition of exponential growth also includes things which don't grow faster with size.) I'll un-revert my edits and try for more precision, and then perhaps you can fix them if they're still lacking, or provide the needed intuition through other means rather than just throwing away my contribution. Lunkwill 06:48, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid I find that your "attempt to be more precise" actually makes it less precise. You wrote:

Usually, this means that the larger the quantity gets, the faster it grows, although the technical definition includes other behaviors as well:

No, the technical definition does not include other behaviors! That's exactly backward: the technical definition includes far less than that. Many functions that grow faster as they get bigger do not grow exponentially (e.g., the squaring function restricted to the positive half-line) but all functions that grow exponentially grow faster as they get bigger. What "other behaviors" did you have in mind?? Michael Hardy 23:24, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You wrote:

The logistic function, for example, grows approximately exponentially at first, but nowhere near exponentially later on.

That completely misses the point, which was clear in the text you replaced! The point is that the logistic function grows approximately exponentially when it is growing slowly, but nowhere near exponentially when it is growing much faster. That makes it a counterexample to the popular misconception that "exponential growth" is synonymous with fast growth. The terms "at first" and "later on" simply don't convey that. Michael Hardy 23:27, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Okay, then fix what I wrote rather than deleting it en masse, because I'm sick of fishing it out of the history, and the article sorely needs better intuitive explanation. You provided no counterexample in your last comment, so I had to go with my own understanding; I assumed you were quibbling about functions like k^n for k<0, negative or fractional n or other weird cases which have an exponential nature but which don't strictly grow more positive. If all you're saying is that other functions can have increasing rates too, then you can change it to say: "this means that the larger the quantity gets, the faster it grows, although there are other functions which also exhibit this behavior." But please either put back my text and fix what's wrong, or provide a better section on understanding the intuition of exponential growth for laypersons. Lunkwill 23:43, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Election

Hello Lunkwill. Thank you for your questions. I've replied at User:Angela/Election questions 2005. Angela. June 29, 2005 18:22 (UTC)

[edit] Election questions

  1. I should have mentioned my user talk page on meta - I'll change that.
  2. No conflict of interest, no ties with any of the companies you mention, nor any other for that matter.

--Francis Schonken 29 June 2005 21:07 (UTC)

[edit] PGP types

I noticed your question on Matt Crypto's page. While he's right, there are several ciphers which are popular and considered secure. Triple DES (aka 3DES, TDES, TDEA) is the oldest and slowest (and not to be used as regular DES since the keyspace is too small), but has stood the test of time. AES is the new American Encryption Standard, and is much faster (upwards of 100MBytes/second on my AMD64). And RC4 is very common for SSL, seems somewhat shaky, but has also been around a long time and is the fastest of the three -- an optimized assembly implementation gets 200MBytes/sec+ on my machine. In general, go with AES unless you have reason not to. Lunkwill 29 June 2005 20:20 (UTC)

Well which offered by PGP is what I probably want. Twofish, CAST5, or AES (Since Triple DES is so horribly slow). AES or Twofish is what I rather like.--x1987x June 30, 2005 04:08 (UTC)
Sure. Go with AES; it's the national standard. Are you doing something where speed is a big concern? Crypto speed is almost never the bottleneck (and the public key ops will be much slower than the symmetric crypto). Incidentally, "openssl speed" on a Unix machine will give you benchmarks for the algorithms it knows about. Lunkwill 30 June 2005 08:27 (UTC)

[edit] Election question

Hi

I answered your question here : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Anthere/WMF2005#Open_discussion

Thanks Anthere

(test)

[edit] Censorship

Aren't you aware that Demiurge, Jtdirl, Djegan and others are engaged in a collusive effort to censor anything (usually related to Irish history or Irish people) they find disagreeable?? The Irish were successful for much of the 20th century in censoring films, TV and books--we must not allow the same thing to happen in the 21st century, despite the activities of the Dallas-based Aquinas Group, which is trying to carry on the efforts of Joseph I. Breen and Martin Quigley. Rms125a@hotmail.com

  • Nonsense! You've been POV-pushing for weeks, mostly using sock-puppets or anon accounts. Anyone who wants evidence need only look at the edit history for Michael Cusack, Eamon de Valera and others. - Ali-oops✍ 10:17, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] The sports page, speedying

You're probably right about speedying the page. I didn't even look at the blog, actually. (As for the standard way, you might have written Speedily delete in bold on the AFD page, but it doesn't matter—you made it clear enough). –Mysid 11:22, 1 December 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Italian link spam

Well done on spotting and removing the link spam from User:217.11.85.205. -- Solipsist 07:58, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! Lunkwill 08:03, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

It doesn't ring a bell. One user with a similar name has been blocked for vandalism and AFAIK is not welcome on WP again. He could alternatively have been blocked automatically by the system itself because he tried to use a blocked IP.

I've just looked at his edit history and none of the articles are things I have ever touched, so it wouldn't have been me who blocked that IP. FearÉIREANN\(caint) 00:43, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't see who put the block on the blocklist. FearÉIREANN\(caint) 00:49, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't see it either. I'm puzzled. Maybe one of the developers might be able to find what happened. FearÉIREANN\(caint) 01:19, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I knew the name rang a bell. He is a rascist bigot who was blocked for constantly posting anti-Roman Catholic and anti-Irish POV diatribes in articles. He also specialised in using a wide variety of sockpuppets. For an example of his POVing edits see [2]

FearÉIREANN\(caint) 01:37, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks:Transwiki:Generate a keypair using OpenSSL

There you go. :) Johnleemk | Talk 04:00, 28 January 2006 (UTC)


[edit] PD stuff

You have some images, such as Image:Tuc_secure, that you {{PD}}'d. I changed these to {{PD-self}}. The ones modified from Larry's I left alone.

--User:Bluefoxicy

FYI - I did the same for your pics on the BYU page Jared 19:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Photo.net

I see where you deleted Photo.net as an 'unhelpful link' in the photography article. I certainly agree with agressive policing of linkspam, but I'd have to say that photo.net is actually a worthwhile entry. SteveHopson 23:59, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gutenberg Photo

The picture you have taken of the Gutenberg Bible seems to be a sly shot taken from a book in a display case. It might even be the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center's (in which case we would be angry) either way, in general patrons of museums are not authorized to take such pictures. There are many fine pictures of the bible available. You may contact the Ransom center if you wold like a CD with more pictures than you could ever want of the book. Alejandr013 20:04, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. Are the photos in the public domain, so that they can be added to the wikipedia? Also, I'm always suspicious when people say "[something is] not authorized", since it implies that we are being compelled by some external force beyond our control. What a scary idea! Who is doing the forbidding, and why should I do what they want? Lunkwill 07:31, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Talk:Boston Tea Party

Howdy, I noticed that you and I seem to post in one or two articles dealing with progressive issues in political science/sociology. There's currently a debate beginning in Boston Tea Party as to whether the article should include the category [3]. It meets definitions set in the articles Terrorism and Definition of terrorism, however, there are several self-proclaimed patriots who watch BTP who refuse to recognise the fact. The simple criteria for terrorism generally seem to be intimidation or destruction of property in order to change public policy or public opinion while a state of war has not yet been declared. Some users would rather use recent acts of terrorism as a yardstick, rather than using a firm definition, and hence lose their ability to discuss matters calmly. Would you be able to pop in to the Talk page and join in the discussion? Thanks much, samwaltz 05:08, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] SHA-1

Hi, hope you didn't mind me sticking the bit about SHA-1 from CRYPTO 2006 back in with tweaks; this (claimed) result got reported in places like Slashdot, so it's newsworthy outside of strictly crypto circles. I think we're safe if we explicitly note that the result was claimed at a rump session. — Matt Crypto 10:38, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Not a bit, good move. Lunkwill 03:53, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Passive-aggressive

You have just reverted the article in a way that reintroduces a mispelling of the word "aggressive" in not one but two places. I suggest that when you encounter an article that has last been worked on by a respected editor (in my case, an admin with thousands of edits and some experience in working an article up to FA status) you edit rather than simply reverting to an earlier version. Metamagician3000 06:53, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Byron Katie

Would love your feedback on the BK talk page if the article is looking better to your eyes? Peace, Sethie 06:10, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Costco

There isn't anything wrong with the segment that you deleted on 11 January from Costco. That information is true, with the exception of the "eaten food" phrase. Besides, the general idea of that passage was there before the former vandalizer edited it. Herenthere 22:56, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't see anything about the Costco stuff you keep deleting. I'm new to this, so I could be overlooking it.

Anyway, showing how well a company takes care of its workers doesn't represent bias. Tons of folks are always asking about the pay/benefits at Costco, as it is constantly mentioned in the press. With over 100,000 employees, anyone who makes a sincere effort can obtain a copy of the employee agreement, just as anyone could obtain a copy of a union contract for the local grocery store. Yes, I understand it isn't posted on the net, but if you do your homework you can obtain it.

All of the info is correct and you can verify it if you research it...I already have. Therefore, I will re-post it. If you wish to dis-prove anything, please provide proof that is is FALSE before you go deleting stuff. I have already provided the citations for anyone who wishes to verify it.

Once again, anyone with Sam's pay/benefit info please feel free to post. It is also relevent. However, pay rates at Sam's are subjective, vary from store to store, employee to employee, so it may not be as "concrete" for an encyclopedia.

As far as skylights go, please cite any one story Costco WITHOUT skylights. Even the very first location has skylights, and it opened in July 1976.

In terms of #1 club, I changed it to make it clear it refers to sales volume, not a subjective "we're number 1" type of statement. It is relevent because many, many, many people incorrectly think that Sam's is the largest club simply because they see more stores. Ask 10 people for yourself, and see what you find out. :-) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Elpablo69 (talk • contribs).

Just because something is true doesn't mean it's encyclopediadic. I don't think people's annual/hourly pay is appropriate or in scope in many company articles. Shouldn't this conversation be happening on Talk:Costco by the way? --Matt 04:25, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Barnstar

Image:Halfstar.png The Half Barnstar
Zytron awards the left half of this Barnstar to Lunkwill for working with Elpablo69 on a compromise to the employment section of the Costco article. (17 May 2007)


[edit] Sam's Club

I'm confused on the Sam's page you wrote (doesn't need to be second sentence of the article) yet it still shows as such.

Anyway if that doesn't need to be the second sentence, then the fact that Wal-Mart is the #1 retailer in the world shouldn't be in the first sentence of it's article????? Of course I think it is appropriate, the size of a company is a major stat.

I figure that for pretty much any company it is one of the first facts how big they are in their industry. On professional sites such as Hoovers, that is one of the first things listed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Elpablo69 (talk • contribs) 04:27, 22 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Image:First_photo.jpg listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:First_photo.jpg, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please see the discussion to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. Calliopejen1 23:15, 29 September 2007 (UTC)