Feedburner has been causing problems (not just for me!), and I’ve moved the site to a normal Atom feed with no analytics attached to it. You can resubscribe to the feed at its new location.

In our society, the term “stupid” carries with it a significant negative judgement, so much so that it is typically used as an insult. It is therefore not commonly considered that stupidity, and its cohort, ignorance, could actually bring with them a great increase of happiness. With no need to learn anything beyond the skills needed to survive, those who elect to remain in intellectual darkness are left with many years of unused life, life that could be spent falling in love, or serving a prison sentence. In contrast, those who feel that continued education is necessary spend many years of their limited lifespan learning, leaving precious little time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. We often observe that “simple pleasures” can be the most gratifying of all, and it cannot be denied that simple people experience more simple pleasures. In fact, many activities that may be negative for an educated person can be enjoyed by one who cares less for information; without any feelings of obligation toward societal progress, the ignorant can do as they please with limited guilt. Such ignorance inevitably leads to, as the tried-and-true idiom predicts, a state of bliss.

A couple days ago, I set to work on what seemed like a fairly straightforward project: I wanted to build a reasonably fast factorization program in plain C. I didn’t need it to be able to factor massive numbers, I just wanted to create it as an exercise. This seemingly basic concept led me into the strange world of number theory, a land I had never been formally introduced to, and ultimately resulted in me gaining quite a bit of knowledge.

I’ve written a lot in the past about the various systems that have powered this blog. It’s gotten to the point now where the most popular topic on this site seems to be the site itself. However, I’ve made a major change to how it all works, and I think that it is important enough this time to justify yet another meta-post.

Mac OS X Lion introduced a new low-level system for managing relationships between physical disks and file systems. Currently, the primary use of CoreStorage is to enable FileVault 2, Lion’s full disk encryption system. CoreStorage includes low-level support for AES-XTS encryption, allowing a filesystem to be used on an encrypted volume without any modifications of the filesystem software. Therefor, any applications running on an encrypted volume don’t need to change any of their behaviors to support the new FileVault features.