User:Chrax

About Me

I am a Discoverer at the Academy. I am a programmer with moderate skill in perl and am beginning with C. I also know Java, but I don't consider that to be to my credit. I'm also interested in math, politics/religion (debates are fun at times) and education.

I plan on going to the University of Tulsa and majoring in CS, unless some crazy shit happens and MIT accepts me and pays me a ton of money to go.

I'm also a sysop, so you can email (or talk) me regarding abuses.

I've recently become interested in distributed computing, and I think the Academy has plenty of cycles it is not using. So I encourage you to join a program and start putting your spare processing power to good use.

Participate in the Rotten.com Dead Pool! And check out my profile.

I have recently come into some new gmail invites. So if anybody is in dire need of a fantastic web-based email client, give me your email and I will send one your way.

For those that are curious about why I use both effigies/Chrax as handles, it's because I picked out Chrax in my 6th grade script-kiddie days, and it is quite obvious that I did so. I'm using effigies more and more now because a) it doesn't reek of h4x0r b) gmail requires at least six letters. Also, I enjoy that it's both a common English word and a Latin word, and I'm somewhat of a language geek.

GCS/M/ED/S d- s++: a--- C++ L+++ P++ E W++ N+ K w-- O- V-- PS+ PE- Y+ t X+ R- tv b++ D--- G++ e- h- r* y

Contact Me

I have:

• A website
• A livejournal
• A Blogger
• A gmail
• A jabber account: chrax@jabber.org
• An AIM account: chrostephir <defunct>
• An MSN account: chrax25@hotmail.com <defunct>

Computing and Whatnot

Current Programming Projects

• Prime Generator
• LITE (LITE Is a Text Editor) - In progress (not ready to expose to the world yet)

pacman Repository

Arch Linux uses the pacman package manager, but their package submittal process is less than perfect. As a result I've created an unofficial pacman repository. Right now it just holds packages that I've built, and soon it will hold a couple that Brian will make, but anyone can submit by emailing me their PKGBUILD files.

Help Wanted

Alpha Testers

<post>Prime Generator v.90 is out and I need people that will go out of their way to break it and send me bug reports.

In this version, there's a config file that will install to /etc/prime.conf and that's where you'll edit locations and file names and other constants. It's now pretty much alright with everything you can do to it, including removing the file. Also, don't hesitate to suggest features. I can't guarantee that I'll include them, because a) I'm not all that great b) your ideas might not be all that great.

You should probably also note that I haven't written a version of this for Windows. You're free to modify it and get it to work, but I don't much plan on doing this myself for quite a while as that would involve using a school computer. </post>

Ass-Kicking Primality Test

<post>Anybody that wants to take the time to look through the source of prime will see this ugly bit of C:

mpz_init_set_ui(test,3); while(mpz_cmp(test,root) <= 0){   /* int equiv: mod = thisnum % test; */   mpz_mod(mod,thisnum,test);   if(mpz_cmp_si(mod,0) == 0){     mpz_clear(root);     mpz_clear(mod);     mpz_clear(test);     return 0;   }   mpz_add_ui(test,test,2); }

and might say "Wow, that's rather brutish, isn't there a GMP primality test or something?" and be quite justified in doing so. Yes there is a GMP primality test mpz_probab_prime_p, but as you might guess from its name, it returns a 1 if it's probably prime. This, frankly, isn't good enough, so until somebody comes up with a good primality test algorithm, we're sticking with the brute force method.

This is where you come in. Recently, three Indians came up with a deterministic time primality test. The problem is that I don't understand it well enough to implement it, and I don't have the time to spend on it any more. What I need is somebody who can take what they've got and turn it into a useful algorithm, and it doesn't need to be in C, it just needs to be something I can translate into C... say English or perl. In fact, getting this down would be so big, I expect we could submit it to the GMP guys to incorporate into a later release. </post>