Monthly Archives: December 2005

I just don’t get fashion

Nice Tie!

The world is just not fair. I mean really, if I wore this pink and black striped tie, people would laugh at me. But if Jessica Alba wears it, she’s “edgy” or “trendy” or “hip”, or whatever it is that the young people are saying now.

You know, that very well might be one of my old ties.

You might be asking yourself, how did Mark find this stuff? After all, as popular as Ms. Alba might be in the geek crowd, you don’t see many references to her on slashdot or digg. Unfortunately, my wife’s love of E! and Hollywood Gossip has rubbed off on me, and The Superficial has made it into my daily bloglines reading list.

I’m pathetic.

WorldNetDaily: California homicides dwarf Iraq deaths

Sigh. Idiocy.

WorldNetDaily reports that recently released crime statistics show the homicide rate in California is 265 percent higher than the death rate suffered by U.S. and British military personnel in Iraq.

No, they don’t. There are probably between 200,000 and 225,000 troops deployed in Iraq. There are 36 million people in California. In 2004, they reported 905 coalition deaths, which makes a death rate of about .4% (assuming 225,000). The death rate in California due to murder was about 0.0067%, or about 60 times lower.

Depth of field using 35mm lenses

This is kind of a crazy Rube Goldberg project for budding videographers: a scheme for creating depth of field using 35mm lenses. Most digital video cameras have very limited depth of field because of their relatively small optics and imagers. So what’s a person to do? Well, basically create a telecine like setup that uses a conventional 35mm lens which casts an image onto a ground glass screen, and then use the DV cam to video that directly with a macro lens. The ground glass in this setup is actually implemented using one of those plastic spacer cds and an old CD player (the moving screen hides scratches and blems in the “ground glass”). Kind of a neat project.

A’s Baseball: Gone, but Not Forgotten

Well, it’s still several months till preseason baseball starts up, but there is still some baseball news going around. The Athletics scored free-agent Esteban Loaiza in a 3 year, $21 million dollar deal. This has sharply increased speculation that GM Billy Beane means to deal Barry Zito in an attempt to get an offensive right-handed bat to complement Eric Chavez.

Names like Frank Thomas and Mike Piazza have been kicked around, but honestly, I can’t really imagine that Beane will cough up any significant dollars to sign either one of those guys. They are getting up there in years, and if you ignore the single steroid laden counter example, most hitters ramp off pretty sharply once they hit 37 or 38.

If I was a gambling man, I’d say that in all likelihood I’ve seen Barry Zito’s last game as an Athletic. Who will they get in exhange? I haven’t a clue.

See Mychael Urban’s column on mlb.com.

Linksys continues to court Linux Hackers

Linksys has sold a bazillion of the old WRT54GS routers. It’s probably due in some small part to the many alternative firmware upgrades you can put on the device to increase its capabilities in a number of innovative directions. The most recent versions of these devices are somewhat less hackable though. The series 5 devices have shifted from using Linux to using VxWorks, and have cut memory down to 2MB of Flash and 8MB of RAM, instead of 4MB of flash and 16MB of RAM for earlier Linux based devices. But to placate the hacker market, Linksys has released the WRT54G”L” which retains the larger memory spaces of earlier models. How long will it last? Hard to say, I’ll be watching this experiment to see how it goes.

Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems

Matt Blaze and company have a new paper just out entitled Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems, which details a number of problems with the methods and equipment normally used by law enforcement to tap phone equipment. These include vulnerabilities that allow the surveilled party to make it appear to call numbers other than the one reached, to disable recording of specific calls and to just generally make it hard for tappers. Interesting stuff, and using relatively straightforward ideas and methodology.

Matt is a remarkable guy, I particularly liked his paper Safecracking for the computer scientist.