The really simple guide to Humanism is a new online learning resource that has been created to help the wider public understand humanism. The interactive website has already had over 1500 visitors since its launch and offers simple answers to the most frequently asked questions about Humanism. The website also features videos of humanists including writers Sue Blackmore, Zoe Margolis and David Nobbs, neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, comedians Ed Byrne and Lucy Porter, philosopher A C Grayling [Auther of The Good Book - a secularist/humanist bible], and journalist Polly Toynbee.

You can visit the website at: www.simpleguidetohumanism.org.uk

World Community Grid.

I was thinking of ways to volunteer for charity but being a bit lazy I didn’t get round to it. Instead I remembered that I had participated in the distributed computing initiative organised by the World Community Grid where you install some software on your computer that utilizes your free CPU cycles when you’re not using them. I had been given a computer that I thought would be good utilize for this task so I stuck a new hard drive in it, installed the latest version of Fedora Linux (15) and got the BOINC software up and running.

Being a little obsessive I decided to install the software on our Windows XP machine, a notebook running Linux and another Laptop (Quad Core i7, 8GB RAM!) too. I now sit back, very satisfied of all this number crunching that I’m doing for various projects such as:

Fight Aids at home.
Childhood Cure For Cancer.
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy
Human Proteome Folding (whatever that is!)
Computing For Clean Water

I strongly recommend you offering up your free CPU cycles for such worthy causes. You can create an account and get the software here:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

For instance the following awk took the list of the 1st 1000 prime numbers and added a column for the difference between each of the prime numbers:

“awk ‘{ p = $1; getline; p = $1 – p; print NR” “p” “$1 }’ plist.txt > p8.txt”

Here’s the gnuplot file:

set dgrid3d 20,20
set hidden3d
set ticslevel 0
set term png
set out “p17.png”
splot “p8.txt” using 1:2:3 title “prime” with lines

And here’s the graph it created:

1st 1000 prime numbers 3D graph -plotted against the difference between each of the prime numbers.

Here are some more graphs – again using the 1st 1000 prime numbers for data but for each one I’ve created another column of data based upon some manipulation of the primes:

3D plot of 1st 1000 prime numbers

3D graph plot of the 1st 1000 prime numbers

3D plot of the 1st 1000 prime numbers

3D gnuplot graph of the 1st 1000 prime numbers

# openssl req -new -x509 -sha1 -newkey rsa:1024 \
> -nodes -keyout test.key -out test.crt \
> -subj ‘/O=NP/OU=Support/CN=www.example.com’
Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key
…………………………………….++++++
……………………….++++++
writing new private key to ‘test.key’
—–

Put the keys in their respective folders:

# ls -lrt
total 912
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 441017 Dec 16 16:09 ca-bundle.crt
-rw-r–r– 1 root root   2240 Dec 16 16:10 Makefile
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    610 Dec 16 16:10 make-dummy-cert
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 441017 Dec 16 16:10 ca-bundle.crt.rpmnew
-rw——- 1 root root   1468 Apr 24 18:13 localhost.crt
-rw-r–r– 1 root root    952 May 27 10:17 test.crt

Updated the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf file:

#SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/localhost.crt
SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/test.crt

#SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/localhost.key
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/test.key

Also added Directory instructions for password authentication within the virtual host section (<VirtualHost _default_:443> :

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
AuthType basic
AuthName “Private”
AuthUserFile /var/www/folder/passwords
Require valid-user
Order allow,deny
</Directory>
The files couldn’t be seen by apache because I’d created them under root (SELinux enabled) so I had to run these
commands:

# restorecon /etc/pki/tls/private/test.key
# restorecon /etc/pki/tls/certs/test.crt

To redirect all requests over SSL I put this in the .htaccess file in the document root (/var/www/html)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

At first the above didn’t work because I had AllowOverride None set in the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file:

#    AllowOverride None
AllowOverride All

Restart apache:

$ service httpd restart

Once changed to All the rewrite works!!

Power up your Fedora machine and login then stick in USB stick.

Fedora 10 mounts USB device automatically.

Find the USB drives system name and mount point:

$ mount

~
/dev/sdb1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=lower,uid=500)

Unmount USB disk:

$ umount /media/disk

Found that fdisk /dev/sdb1 didn’t work as a normal user so su to root:

$ su -
Password:

$ fdisk /dev/sdb1

Options:

p – to show partition
n – for new partition
defaults – take all the defaults until returned to “Command (m for help):”
w – to write the changes

I got some errors here but decided to try the mkfs.ext3 command anyway…

$ mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/sdb1

I noticed that fdisk ($ fdisk -l) still showed it as FAT32 but once I removed the stick and stuck it back in again (automatically mounted by Fedora) a right-click on the icon and a show of properties showed that it was ext3.