Happy 40th Sgt. Peppers!

In another innovation, non-US pressings of the album (in its original LP form that was later released on CD) end in an unusual way, beginning with a 15-kilohertz high-frequency tone (put on the album at Lennon’s suggestion and said to be “especially intended to annoy your dog”), followed by an endless loop of laughter and gibberish made by the runout groove looping back into itself…

…most of the content of the runout groove is impossible to decipher, it is possible to distinguish a sped-up voice (possibly McCartney’s) reciting the phrase “never could see any other way”.

Abbey Road > Let it Be > The White Album > Sgt. Pepper’s

Surveyed as albums only. Rubber Soul, Magical Mystery Tour, and Revolver obviously have great tunes too.

Slightly last minute tickets to the Gartner IT Security Summit just fell in my lap.

Know Security 3.0
4-6 June 2007
Washington, DC
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel

See you there!

I know, I know. I’m still looking forward to it for various reasons.

Via funsec: Software controls at the Carson, CA treasurer’s office failed to prevent the installation of a keylogger on a laptop. Theives used the keylogger to acquire the username and password of an account able to make fund transfers, then transfered themselves half a million dollars.

They were caught when the treasurer noticed it in the ledger.

Since the incidents occurred, the city’s bank has tightened its security to prevent future similar attacks, she said. The new system requires the city to register the specific computers that will be used for online transactions, she said, while also asking a series of security questions that must be properly answered to gain access to the account.

“That’s in place now,” Avilla said. “It wasn’t in place last Wednesday and Thursday.”

An IT consultant who was brought in to help the city before the thefts is also assisting in evaluating security and what needs to be improved, she said.

A no-tech accounting process detected the event. Mitigation plan: implement further software controls and procedures.

Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I’m a…

One of my current favorite photography techniques, or ‘hacks’, to use the parlance of our times, is to capture slices of time which cannot easily be appreciated otherwise. Mostly because it is easy to happen into accidentally. Anyone can do this.

This great shorpy post of baseball player Hank Gowdy is of a relatively centered composition with nice shadowing and depth of field. While those elements give the photo a lasting quality, what grabs on the first viewing is Hank’s facial expression, and the ball he likely just tossed up to hit for practice popping out of the page just over his head.

It made me think of this photo I was lucky enough to get at my wife’s uncle’s wedding:

The photo isn’t really very successful. The ceiling tilts away from the bachelors while at the same time closing in on the groom, and creates a useless gap of space. The groom is not in focus and his shadow on the distant wall is distracting, as are the baloons and light fixture between the groom and the eligible bachelors. A more successful shot would have started with the camera a few feet higher, used remote flashes, and perhaps caught the garter a few feet sooner mid-flight.

Nonetheless, the photo does work. At least five of the subjects are mid-action. The wedding band is visible. While the flash induced shadows are a detractor in most of the picture, it helps lift the garter and give it precense. Nobody blinked, so to speak. For being amongst the first few hundred pictures with my new camera and first DSLR (what do you mean I have to frame shots through a viewfinder again?), it isn’t a bad start.

Wow.

From Emergent Chaos: the TSA behavior detection team had the state boys in Florida lock up a gentleman in an irregular army uniform. The acronym for this magic (you knew it was coming) is “Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT)”.

A little over ten years ago, I was SPOTed by a Marine recruiter in the high school cafeteria. I was wearing my dad’s old USMC short sleeve dress shirt with sergeant stripes on the sleeves and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt under it. The recruiter headed directly for me, so that he could let me know that I outranked him. He also told me that it was illegal to wear the uniform with the stripes still on it, and was I aware of the many exciting things the United States Marine Corps could do for me.

He didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t really in Led Zeppelin.

Rodrigo y Gabriela - 6/30/2007, 9:00 pm @ Rams Head Live!

I just ordered tickets.

Rodrigo y Gabriela are two fast-fingered, Dublin-based, Mexicans with a unique sound created on acoustic guitars. Their music is difficult to define, straddling both world and rock, and often imbued with timeless Hispano – classical influences. The duo’s repertoire flies beyond familiar Latin folk guitarists’ styles because of the metal connection: their reworkings of Led Zep’s “Stairway to Heaven” and Metallica’s “Orion” are musts.

Who knew? Stairway is a metal tune.

Bruce Schneier’s latest wired.com commentar is excellent.

People tend to base risk analysis more on personal story than on data, despite the old joke that “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

While there is plenty of philosophical wiggle room in this statement, most of us base decisions and estimations and opinions on personal experience, with anecdotal experience a close second. It is such an amazingly successful strategy that it completely dominates the thought processes of individuals unwilling to concede to the superior experience of others. Most of us start to grow out of it some time in young adulthood.

This isn’t a strong field of experience to me, so I’m generalizing based on what I’ve gleaned from coursework and experience even in surmising that oh god I’ve recursed, I’m going fractal.

Starting over:

Citing examples of others being irrational is easy by the nature of the statement, but it is more insightful to pinpoint personal irrationality. Insight is nice but it’s really really hard. Surround oneself with people that can help is the trick. If your friends and associates aren’t providing insights of this sort, you are either enlightened or wasting time.

But that’s not the way we think. Psychologist Scott Plous said it well in The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making: “In very general terms: (1) The more available an event is, the more frequent or probable it will seem; (2) the more vivid a piece of information is, the more easily recalled and convincing it will be; and (3) the more salient something is, the more likely it will be to appear causal.”

On a lighter note, this process also impacts opinions on fashion, entertainment, visual art, music, education, gun control, social welfare, the death penalty, and so on and so forth.

Echard Wheeler, the photographer we had at our wedding, has posted a selection on his blog if you’d like a quick peek. If you’d like to see a bunch more, or buy prints:

Pictage. The event key is ‘Guitar Hero’.

What ended up on my camera during the week is both here and on flickr.

Here’s me with a bit of an Eric Clapton chin going on. I must have been playing Crossroads on Expert - I get into it.

Creating applications with applescript is really easy but every time I use it I want to think like a shell or perl scripter and end up bailing. This has been especially annoying with the screenshot and publish script I’ve been using for the past five years. The port to applescript was easy but creating an application out of the shell script didn’t work as expected. I then ported it to Automator when that came out. Ugh. I ended up going back to shell and escaping out for native OSX image handling which is superior to imagemacick.

Platypus to the rescue!

Platypus is a development tool for the Mac OS X operating system. It can be used to create native, flawlessly integrated Mac OS X applications from interpreted scripts, such as shell scripts or Perl and Python programs. This is done by wrapping the script in an application bundle directory structure along with an executable binary that runs the script.

Finally!

I tweaked the script with a few more ‘mac’ touches, now it pipes the url into pbcopy, then asks OSX to open the uploaded file in whatever the default browser is. Then I made an app out of it with Platypus.