New fashion accessory?
Seen at The Gap: it’s always nice to have mannequins set up so you can see how clothing will look on you…
…so long as you don’t mind a little back pain.
New fashion accessory? Read More »
Nice to know where I stand
Mark Oppenheimer in Slate gives odds about what the next minority group will be to win the White House. Looks like even without those Burning Man photos floating around the Net my chances are slim:
The atheists: When the lion lies down with the lamb, when the president is a Republican Muslim and the Democratic speaker of the House is a vegan Mormon lesbian, when the secretary of defense is a Jain pacifist from the Green Party, they will all agree on one thing: atheists need not apply. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president. (By contrast, only 43 percent wouldn’t vote for a homosexual, and only 24 percent wouldn’t vote for a Mormon.) As Ronald Lindsay, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, told me in an e-mail: “Atheism spells political death in this country.”
Indeed. Only one current congressman has confessed to being an atheist: Rep. Pete Stark, a Democrat from the lefty East Bay region of Northern California. If he ever ran for president, he would need God’s help just as surely as he wouldn’t ask for it.
I suppose I can take solace that Stark happens to be my congressman. So at least I’m represented. 🙂
(Via Political Animal)
Nice to know where I stand Read More »
New media criticism blog: Medialogy.net
Medialogy.net is a new media criticism blog started by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (my brother), Blinxia Yu and Christopher Ernst:
:|: Medialogy.net is a new net criticism initiative publishing micro-essay insights into current trends in media and visual culture. It is an open forum for new critical voices; we are continuously seeking articles and comments with fresh perspectives on emerging media phenomena. Medialogy.net was begun with the desire to distribute, expand, and textually manifest a rolling conversation between young media researchers and artists globally networked through the university and gallery system. We seek to match a cynical perspective with critical intelligence, and a constant willingness to pull down old paradigms and icons of media philosophy and cultural criticism.
It’s especially interesting to see discussion about the same media trends and subjects I tend to link to (OK, when I’m posting at all), but from the perspective of people who come first from the media side (in this case film) and second from the technology side rather than the other way around.
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iCandy
My lab has just released a beta of iCandy, an application for Mac and PC that lets you associate an image and a two-dimensional QR bar code with any iTunes song, YouTube video or Flickr photo, and to print them out as postcards, business cards, posters or photo albums. Then you can just hold the barcode up to a webcam to automatically bring up the photo or play the song or movie.
The app itself is pretty cute (we’ve been using it internally for a few months now) and they’ve recently set up a community network site for sharing your playlists and media pics with others too. The online Flash-based version seems to be broken at the moment, but check out the app.
Wolverine costume with retractable claws
This year’s theme for Halloween was super heroes, so around the beginning of October I set out to design a Wolverine costume. The outfit is based on the X-Men movies, because it’s a lot easier to look cool in black leather than yellow spandex. The claws I based on the comic books, with thin claw-like blades coming out of studs on the backs of my hands rather than knives coming out from between my knuckles as they did in the movies. That was both because I like the more animal look of the original and because it made it a lot easier to make the claws retractable.
For more pictures, video and step-by-step instructions on how to design your own, check out my Instructable at instructables.com.
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Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear
In the past week, we have heard Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) call for an investigation of whether members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America.” As a first-term representative she can perhaps be dismissed as fringe, but we’re hearing similar language from Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, and some are beginning to see this as a pattern on the part of the McCain campaign.
Fifty-eight years ago, Senator Margaret Chase Smith — the first woman to be elected to the US Senate — had the courage to speak out against fellow Republican Joe McCarthy and his unconscionable debasement of the US Senate “to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.”
“The nation sorely needs a Republican victory,” she said in her Declaration of Conscious, “but I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.” As a first-term Senator, speaking out against not only a member of her own party but one of the Senate’s most powerful and vindictive members was hardly a career-advancing move, costing her a key subcommittee appointment and almost costing her her reelection.
It would be another four years before the Senate would finally censure Senator McCarthy and bring his witch hunt to an end, four years in which countless careers were destroyed, our leaders were distracted from addressing more pressing issues, and paranoia and division gripped our nation. It would be many more years before the damage done during that period would be repaired. History now remembers Senator Smith as being the first to speak out against this nightmare, before it became safe or popular to do so.
In the coming months and years we will be asking our elected representatives to lead us out of a global financial crisis, climate change, two wars and a severely tarnished reputation abroad. To address these problems we will need to draw on the strengths and ideas from all the diverse backgrounds, faiths and ideologies our great nation has to offer. We can not afford to waste time with hatred and division in our government or in the population at large.
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View the ‘real source’ of a webpage
One great thing about the web is that you can tell your browser to “View Source” whenever you want to figure out how the page managed to get all those hamsters to dance like they do. Or at least that was how it used to be — nowadays most interesting pages are dynamically generated, which means the source you see often little more than .
When I was writing dynamic pages for a project a little while back I got tired of not being able to see what my page looked like after all the JavaScript got done with it, and eventually I tracked down this cute little bookmarklet:
javascript:if (window.document.body.outerHTML != undefined) {''+window.document.body.outerHTML+' '} else if (document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML != undefined) {''+document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML+' '} else if (window.document.documentElement.outerHTML != undefined) {''+window.document.documentElement.outerHTML+' '} else {alert('Your browser does not support this functionality') };
Just copy it all into one line (remove the linefeeds, they’re just there for readability) and put it as the URL of a bookmark. Then whenever you want to see the real source of a page, it’s just a click away.
(I wish I could remember where I found this little gem, but from a quick search it looks like it’s been floating around for a while…)
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Magnetic Wall Chessboard
The latest addition to our magnetic wall: a wall-mounted magnetic chessboard. Basically we took a cheap chessboard, glued some rare-earth magnets into the bases of the plastic pieces, and glued some magnetic backing onto the board itself. To the side is a little magnetic label with one side printed “White to move” and the other printed “Black to move.” Just make a move and flip the label over for the next person to move.
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Why are secret URLs “security through obscurity”?
Yesterday’s InformationWeek had an article about how cellphone pictures sent via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) by customers of U.K. mobile network Operator O2 are winding up available via Google search pages. The article, titled Picture Leak: O2’s Security Through Obscurity Can’t Stop Google, explains that O2 provides a fallback for customers who try to send photos from their cellphone to cellphones that don’t support MMS, namely they post the photos online and then send the recipient a URL to the picture via email. For security, each URL includes a 16-hex-digit (64-bit) hex digit message ID. The “problem”, as they breathlessly explain it, is that some of these URLs are getting indexed by Google, and can be discovered by performing a search with the inurl: search type.
The whole thing is much ado about nothing — further investigation shows that the reason a handful of these “secret” URLs wound up in Google is that people were using MMS to post photos directly to their public photo–blogs. While it’s not the case here, I do have to wonder at the charge that secret URLs are somehow just security through obscurity, which usually refers to a system that is secure only as long as its design or implementation details remain secret. That’s not the case here — even a modest 16-hex-digit ID is about as difficult to guess as a random ten-character password containing numbers and upper & lowercase letters. What can be a risk is that people and programs are used to URLs being public knowledge, and so sometimes they aren’t safeguarded as well as one might safeguard, say, his bankcard PIN number. On the plus side, unguessable URLs can easily be made public when it’s appropriate, for example when posting to your photo blog from your O2 cellphone. Now if only we could selectively prevent clueless reporters trying to write scare-stories from finding them…
Why are secret URLs “security through obscurity”? Read More »
Magnetic wall
This weekend’s project was to paint the dining room wall and bedroom doors with magnetic paint (paint with an iron-dust mix-in). Actually, this was my wife’s project while I fixed the bathroom sink — but that project was much less interesting to blog about. The dining room is shaping up to hold all the various birth & wedding announcements, plus magnetic poetry and probably some random wall games. The bedroom doors will be more personal expressions, and right now the guest room has tourist magnets from everyone who’s visited. Best of all, it’s a great excuse for another order from our favorite magnet source!
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| Magnetic Primer | The start of our downstairs postboard… |
…and poetry wall |
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| Guest room door | Our daughter’s (*PINK*) door |
Our bedroom door |