Technology for Mortals

If the bad news about all the new critical iPhone and Mac OS X vulnerabilities announced at BlackHat 2009 weren’t bad enough, there now appears to be a new vulnerability in Apple’s hardware.  This type of a hack h0wever isn’t something where you can go into an Apple store and have an Apple “genius” exorcise because once the Apple keyboard is infected and locked; there is no practical way of undoing the damage.

Read the rest and see my video interview with the researcher at DigitalSociety.org

This video is shot with the Canon 500D (AKA Rebel T1i).  While the footage looks great (considering the fact that I didn’t really have much light in the room, Canon really needs to give us manual aperture and exposure control for video mode on this camera because of the erratic exposure behavior in video recording mode.  When I zoom in or out, you can see a quick change in brightness and hear some clicking noises when the aperture mechanism becomes erratic.   Canon added manual controls for video mode on their higher end 5D Mark II in a firmware upgrade, so all the 500D owners need to unite and demand the same firmware upgrade for the 500D (Note that full manual control is already supported in still photo mode).

Regarding the movie star in this video, this cute little orange tabby was feral 2 weeks ago when he came to my house looking for mommy, and now he’s nearly doubled his weight and became tame (and spoiled).

Note that despite the fact that I set the embedded video to so called “HD” 720P mode (which is actually only ~2 Mbps meaning it’s lower than DVD quality for everything other than completely still footage), Google changed it so that you have to manually toggle the “HD” button to see the higher quality. I’m sure the bandwidth costs are killing Google so they’re hoping that most people won’t opt in on the higher quality.

Update 7/26/2009 – This guy hacked a Sigma lens to do manual aperture.
Update 7/27/2009 – This problem appears only when I’m using the Tokina 28-70 2.8 lens, which happens to be my favorite lens as far as optics and zoom characteristics are concerned.  It doesn’t appear on the 18-55 USM/IS 3.5-5.6 Canon lens that came with the Canon 500D camera, nor does it happen with an older Sigma 70-300 macro-capable lens.  Also noteworthy is I can pretty much shoot ants with the 300 mm Sigma.  And because the resolution demands of even 720P and 1080P video isn’t that high compared to still photography, I can pretty much use any lens with great results.

Ms. Maureen Callahan at the New York post seems to have struck a nerve and become somewhat of a villainess for her article “Fairytale Ending: Why is no one suspicious of Simon Cowell’s latest creation?” criticizing the Suzan Boyle YouTube phenomenon. Someone should have pulled Maureen aside and whispered to her that writing this article is tantamount to standing up in a WWE wrestling event and shouting “IT’S FAKE!” Yes Maureen, deep down inside we all know it’s a show but we want to maintain the facade that it’s real. What you’ve gone and done is burst that facade and a lot of people are very angry with you. People (especially in a down economy) want to believe in a fairytale and acknowledging the fact that it was less accidental than a calculated stunt sort of ruins it for people.

The reality is that I don’t know if Mr. Cowell was aware of Ms. Boyle’s talent level or not. I would think that the acting surprised part for the judges would be easier if they haven’t heard or seen the contestants before. What probably happened is that Mr. Cowell simply instructed his production team to find interesting contestants especially if it’s a good fairy tail story out of the available pool of sincere contestants.  Ms. Boyle certainly qualifies as extremely interesting because of the large disparity between her visual apperance and musical talents and that was likely the reason she was selected to go on the show.  However, she has had to earn her new found fame with the performance that she gave and everyone is rightfully happy for her.

If you’ve watched the show before, you know that this is a reoccurring theme where the judges and audience willingly heckle the contestant and perform a 180 degree turn when the contestant shocks them with talent. That simply makes for good entertainment just like the audience at a professional wrestling event play along with the act while being in on the whole thing.

Maureen, we’re all performers on TV or print. I would even wager that you probably weighed the risk of backlash in your story with the insane number of page views you got from the DrudgeReport. Heck, you even got me to go off topic and link to you so you’re doing something right. The problem is that you’re being somewhat hypocritical.

This is definitely one of the most creative short movies I’ve seen in some time and it makes use of some fantastic computer graphics. Much of the technology exists in virtual reality research today in primitive form but this video shows you what might be possible down the road and it shows it in a very artistic context.

For some reason, YouTube is not letting these clips go to high quality mode automatically so be sure to click on the “HQ” button to view it at a higher quality.

We are now in an era of cheap high definition video cameras, cheap data center Internet bandwidth, free Internet HD broadcasting, and cheap computing power.  The only thing artists need is creativity, talent, and a little time on their hands.

Heads up from Justin James.

Nothing really caught my eye this year but this one was funny.

I watched most of the game this year and it’s probably the only football game I follow these days.  Watching the Pittsburg Steelers almost throw the game away with three penalties, two of which were just unnecessary and unsportsman like conduct has got to be frustrating for the Steelers fans and the team.  Those two unsportsmanlike penalties led to a safety for the Cardinals which could have easily cost the Steelers the game.

I know this kind of stuff drove me crazy when I played sports.  It’s one thing when kids behave like this but these guys get paid millions of dollars a year to do a job.  But what is the point of slapping your opponent in the head after he’s already out of bounce and giving the other team 15 yards?  Then we had James Harrison punching a much smaller cardinal player in the back and then shoving him to the ground after the play which should have gotten him ejected from the game and fined later on.

Thanks to this article from reelseo.com, I now know how to embed 720P HD video from YouTube. Here’s are some samples of videos I uploaded from my Lake Tahoe trip this week. All you need to do is add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the source parameter. Vimeo used to be my preferred video sharing site but they only let you upload 1 HD video per week and they have a weekly cap of 500 GB. The bigger problem for Vimeo is that they don’t let you embed their videos in 720P HD unless you pay them money. YouTube used to be really poor quality and even their High Quality (HQ) mode was dubious in quality because it was only 640 Kbps. Now this new 1280×720 service which probably streams at around 2 to 2.5 Mbps is superb quality. I initially had some problems with this new service from YouTube stuttering but the problems appear to be fixed for the most part. YouTube now appears to be the king of video sharing. The only limitation that still annoys me is the 10 minute and 1 GB file size limit. Note that the video source could have been much better if I had used a real video camera instead of a point-n-shoot Kodak still camera that happened to have 720P video capability.  I avoided using my Sony 1080i HDV camcorder because it was easier to put a point-n-shoot in to my pocket.  I’ll try to upload something of better quality with less sound and video noise and snow storms aren’t exactly conducive to this.

Like most people, I didn’t know Professor Randy Pausch or ever heard of the man, but I saw his last lecture (via Slashdot) on YouTube and I wish I had known him. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it because it’s heartwarming and inspirational.

Thanks to “Fake Steve Ballmer” for the video!

But let’s get real folks. The MacBook Air is a pretty slick design. Regardless of what peripheral capabilities it does and does not have, it packs a lot into a pretty tight package, and Apple deserves kudos for that. I am fairly certain that most users don’t need an optical drive, either (especially if they get media via iTunes or something similar). And a lot of consumers (and prosumers), basically anyone not tied to a corporate desk 8 hours a day has a WiFi connection, so the wired NIC is less of a requirement for a lot of people. But where did Apple miss? The mouse. Every laptop user I know who uses it for more than 1 meeting a week is forced to drag a mouse around with them everywhere. And that’s the real rub. I don’t care what you do to the device, users hate the trackpads and pointing sticks, and these devices will always be cumbersome if the user has to drag one (and a power cord) around. That’s the real pain point, not the thickness or even the weight.

J.Ja