In this article, I’ll try to explain as much as I can about hashes and collisions and my latest discovery of a triple hash collision while keeping things as simple as possible.

What Is A Hash:

It’s a cryptographic function, which takes some data as input, and generates a string, usually composed of hex characters. Now, hash differs from a checksum. Checksums are mostly made for files, to verify they’re integrity, while a hash can be both used for files and passwords(or plaintext data).

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The LCD TV in my office started having issues with the LCD screen a couple weeks ago so I had to take the TV in to get the screen replaced. Luckily the LCD panel happened to be under warranty or I would have been out $2200. Regardless though it left me without the TV in my office which I use not only for TV but also for a second computer screen from one of my desktop computers so I was limited to using my HP w2408h monitor to watch movies, etc. One of the things I wanted to accomplish was to get the HD DVD player from my Xbox 360 working on a Windows 7 computer so I could watch some older movies on the monitor while the TV was in the shop. Below is information regarding what issues I ran across and how to overcome them which really is limited to the software used to play the HD DVD movies.

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Yesterday we had to upgrade a Ubuntu Linux server from a really old version of Ubuntu to the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu. When attempting to run the upgrade from the command line from a file on a Ubuntu CD we were getting an error which is described in more detail below along with what can be done to resolve the issue.

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Earlier today I needed to use sort to output unique lines from a file to a new file but ran into an issue. I was attempting to use the sort command on a Windows 7 computer with Cygwin installed. Below is information on the initial error I received and then how it was resolved.

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Once I finally made it past the PHP build process the Litespeed Admin Console Detailed Log complained of not being able to find autoconf. This one is fairly obvious but wanted to note just in case someone is not familiar with the autoconf package. Again since this is a new server with a minimal install the autoconf package had not been installed. Below are details about the error from the Litespeed Detailed Log and how to install autoconf via yum.

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