Monthly Archives: November 2005

Creating an Anaglyph from a Stereograph

A couple of weeks ago, I was playing with creating red-blue anaglyphs using the GIMP and images from the Library of Congress collection of stereograms which you can download. Today, I spent a couple of minutes to do a simple screencast that shows how to do it (WMV, I’m trying to figure how to rip it into other formats). If you find it useful or have any suggestions, drop a comment here or send me an email.

The Core Pocket Media Player

I just noticed that there was a new version of The Core Pocket Media Player available. When I upgraded my Dell Axim x50v to Windows Mobile 5, TCPMP no longer seemed to use the accelerated graphics hardware, which this new release seems to cure: it again has support for the accelerated chipset. Unfortunately, AAC support has been removed, which means that many MPEG4 videos I have no longer play. Frown.. Still, a worthy media player.

Problems with the $100 laptop

Lee Felsentstein writes about what he thinks are the Problems with the $100 laptop, and I think many of the issues he raises are good ones, worthy of serious discussion. The question shouldn’t really be “should we give a laptop to every child or not”, but rather “if we are going to invest millions of dollars to attempt to raise the economic level of the developing world, is this the most appropriate use of our money?” I think that Lee posts some excellent points to indicate that it will not be.

Brainwagon Radio: Problems with Bluetooth Installation

Does it bother you when hardware doesn’t behave the way it is supposed to? I recently bought a new Bluetooth dongle to use with my laptop, and this relatively simple task turned into the subject of a rant. Just once, I’d like to buy a chunk of hardware that either

  • just worked without any installation at all, or barring that miracle…
  • installed in just the way the manual says it does.

I’m looking at you, Dlink. Should I really have to do all this when your silly drivers don’t install like they are supposed to?

Schneier on the Sony Rootkit

Wired News is running a terrific editorial by cryptography and security expert Bruce Schneier. He poses a question that I hadn’t considered before:

Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of all time — on a par with worms like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda.

What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn’t notice Sony’s rootkit as it infected half a million computers? And this isn’t one of those lightning-fast internet worms; this one has been spreading since mid-2004. Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn’t notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we’re paying those companies to detect — especially because the rootkit was phoning home.

The only difference between the malware that Sony has installed and your typical garden variety type is that the first is backed by a multinational corporation with lots of assets. The virus and anti-spyware companies have been slow to respond to protect their customers, presumably out of some sense of courtesy to their corporate compadres.

You might expect Microsoft to be the first company to condemn this rootkit. After all, XCP corrupts Windows’ internals in a pretty nasty way. It’s the sort of behavior that could easily lead to system crashes — crashes that customers would blame on Microsoft. But it wasn’t until Nov. 13, when public pressure was just too great to ignore, that Microsoft announced it would update its security tools to detect and remove the cloaking portion of the rootkit.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Microsoft and the constellation of anti-virus companies that serve to help protect it are not out to protect you, the consumer. They are doing the absolute mininum necessary to keep you using their products, and they are willing to utilize the very technologies which they should be protecting you against to annoy, harrass, and generally make your life annoying. The DRM measures which are part of Windows and which will be deployed even more extensively in Vista do nothing for the customer, they are merely part of corporate collusion designed to extract more money from consumers. Now, we have anti-virus companies doing precisely the same thing, for even more inexplicable reasons.

I suspect that ten years from now, we will be citing this as a landmark case in computer law, perhaps even equal to the first Sony case.

Tinkering with Tinkertoys Zometool

Zome is a nerd toy that allows you create all sorts of amazing polyhedral models. Some people are more serious about them than others.

A Stellated Icosahedron

Addendum: A couple of days ago, I picked up one of those generic “ball bearing and magnet” sets that allow you to build similar structures at Walgreens. It was $9.99 for a 250 piece set, which seemed pretty good. I assembled a stellated icosahedron, but I don’t really recommend the set: the magnets are incredibly weak, and it’s almost impossible to move the model without destroying it.

The Story of Eddie Gaedel

Eddie Gaedel bats against Bob Cain

I must admit, I’m a fairly unschooled student of baseball history, which is part of the reason why I’m trying to read up on the subject and play around with various baseball databases. Today, on a lark, I decided to try to figure out how tall the average baseball player was (just a tad over six feet), what they weighed (183 pounds) and so on. I then graphed the results, and found a startling outlier: there was apparently a major league player who was 43 inches tall and weighed only sixty five pounds! A short google later, and I found the story of Eddie Gaedel.

Check it out, and then tell me that baseball isn’t a fun game.

The Real Value of Podcasting

If you really are doing it for the love, why bother assigning a number to it?

Let’s put it another way: if my goal is to maximize the value that I create, I obviously can do that in a couple of different ways, I can either choose to concentrate and create things which are truly of large value to a smaller number of people, or I could settle for quantity over quality and pander to the lowest common denominator. There has to be more to how you choose to live your life than spamming lots of individuals with trivial thoughts.