Stimulating Pixels

This is an amazing use of software and public images to create something new in the world. I saw a video with the original version of this some time ago and was very impressed then, but the secondary controls they have added now are even better.

Very Cool

As more and more of us become electronic cyborgs (via pacemakers, internal drug delivery systems, etc…) the potential for detrimental hacking of those devices increases as well. See, for example, this story found via boingboing about researchers who have figured out how to hack into a pacemaker and shut it down via remote control.

I can see this being part of a plot to a movie. Some political leader dies and they think his pacemaker just gave out, but it was really an assassination. Of course, there is frightening real world potential for this.

I’ve written before about how WordPress doesn’t really have a way to allow you to put administration tools in a secure location unless you do the same thing with the entire blog. This concerns me since I’m often on a wireless network that is open and not mine. Say, for example, at a book store with free wireless. While surfing on an open wireless network is generally pretty benign, sending any username/password across it without them being secure/encrypted makes it very easy to steal them.

I’ve hunted around a few times before, but had never really found a good solution. While doing some work on my site, I decided to try again and this time came up with “Admin-SSL“. It’s a plug-in someone wrote for WordPress that allows you to move all the “admin” stuff to a secure location. Something that isn’t possible with the default install of WordPress (where you are either all secure or all open).

There are two examples of the power and benefit of open-source software with this plug-in. First off is the basic fact that WordPress is open which allowed for the plug-in to be created in the first place. While this isn’t limited to open source software, it’s a big help.

Second, when I installed the plug-in on my site, it didn’t work properly. Some of the software that runs my site is different where the plug-in was originally created. However, since I could look at the source code, I was able to find a fix that works and allows me to use the it. To contribute back to the overall community a little, I’ve sent a note back to the original author explaining what I ran into and how I fixed it. This gives him the opportunity to let other people know about the issue and a way to fix it. Possibly even creating a specific fix for the issue in the next version.

Stop reading…. unless you are a web geek and/or are specifically looking for a fix for Admin-SSL on version 1.3 of the Apache web server. Below are the details of the fix that works for me. YMMV.

First, the short and sweet fix to try:

When you configure Admin-SSL (at least version 1.1) on a server running Apache 1.3, under the “Other Settings” category and the “HTTPS Detection” section

change: “The name of the HTTPS $_SERVER variable”
to: “SERVER_PORT” (without the quotes)

and change: “The value of the HTTPS $_SERVER variable when HTTPS is ON”
to: “443″ (again, without the quotes)

Now some details. Admin-SSL uses the predefined $_SERVER['HTTPS'] php variable to check for secure connections while pattern matching to see if it should redirect a page to a protected URL. While this variable is available in Apache 2.x it is not in the Apache 1.3.x versions of the server.

See the list of “specials” under the “RewriteCond Directive” for reference:
Apache 2.x – http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritecond
Apache 1.3 – http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteCond

You can use an existing feature in the Admin-SSL configuration (described above) to get around this limitation assuming the port that your host uses for SSL is different from. Usually, SSL is set to run on port “443″. If your provider uses a different port, you can simply use that instead. The only exception to this is if you have a host that runs both HTTP and HTTPS over the same port. In that case, there is no way to tell the difference in the script using the above method.

All this, of course, assumes that your host provides you with a way to access your site via HTTPS with either a private or shared cert. A general practice is for them to setup URLS like:

“https://www.your-site.com/~your-username/” that would simply give you a secure version of “http://www.your-side.com/”. If you don’t see a colon followed by a number after the .com, you should be running on 443. If you see something like “https://www.your-site.com:1234/~your-username/”, that means that your host is running HTTPS on port “1234″, or whatever the number there is. That’s the number you would want to configure.

If, for some strange reason, that number is “80″, you’re going to have to fins another solution, because that’s the standard port for web traffic which means the script wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

I mentioned that I do Skunk Works projects to a colleague who was unfamiliar with the term. Turning to the all-knowing Wikipedia I pulled the following:

Skunk Works is a term first coined in 1943 by Lockheed, currently trademarked by Lockheed Martin and widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Reading further, I saw a reference to "Bootlegging". I didn’t know that there is a business world definition for the term. Apparently, there is:

In economics and business administration literature, Kenneth E. Knight introduced the notion bootlegging in 1967. Bootlegging is defined as research in which motivated individuals secretly organise the innovation process. It usually is a bottom-up, non-programmed activity, without the official authorisation of the responsible management, but for the benefit of the company. It is not in the department’s action plan nor are there any formal resources allocated towards it (Augsdorfer 1996).

I do that too. I’m close to winding up a project that has been pretty much all consuming since sometime around October of last year. Can’t wait to get back to the bootlegging stuff. It will come as a most welcome change of pace from the big ol’ formal project.

The tag line for the web site Forvo.com is “All the words in the world. Pronounced.” Using the power of people who want to contribute, they are creating a catalog of audio recordings of how words are spoken. You can contribute too, if you like. Behold yet another awesome tool provided by the intertubes.

The site could use some better bablefish type cross-referencing. Even without that, a creative person could probably assemble a pretty good foreign language course using this as a back bone. Sentence construction would be tough, but for the simple individual word standpoint, there’s some nice potential.

Now that I think about it, the potential of the internet to provide foreign language education is HUGE. A quick search makes it look like at least one site is working on this: phrasebase.com. Using a Wikipedia approach to foreign language teaching/learning should be well within the realm of possibility.

Wired provides an overview here.

A few months ago when it seemed like I was on the road more than I was at my house my several year old MP3 player finally gave up it’s digital ghost. I hadn’t really looked at MP3 players in long time so I checked out some reviews and was just going to get a relatively basic one that could also play some video. While checking our reviews I saw one for the iPod Touch. It wasn’t really on my list for consideration because of its price, but there’s an apple store pretty close and I wanted to at least check it out.

I’m not a big name brand guy. I’d prefer to have something that does a good job than has a good name. And, if all things are equal, I’d rather not pay a premium if all that gets me is a name. Since MP3 players are almost a commodity good at this point, I really didn’t think I’d end up being sucked in to the purchase. That was until about 10 seconds after I picked the thing up.

Apple is so very good at Industrial Design. The iPod Touch is an excellent example of their expertise in the field. If it was just an MP3 player, I probably wouldn’t have made the jump, but the screen on it is huge for a hand held which makes watching video on it quite nice. A bonus is the fact that a photographer can carry around a pretty high quality portfolio of as many images as they are likely to want. Obviously not as good as an actual book, but something like the touch is way more portable and therefore likely to actually be with you most of the time.

Of course, you could step up to the iPhone as well and get all this along with cell phone stuff. I’ll admit I was pretty tempted on this front, but the contract requirement for the iPhone was more than I wanted to get into at this point. In the mean time, I’ll settle for carrying the Touch and my cell.

I’ve got a few minor gripes about the iPod Touch though.

1) There is no external speaker like there is on the iPhone. Most of the time, this is no big deal, but it would be nice to play a video that multiple people could watch and listen to at the same time.

2) There should be physical buttons to control the volume. Same probably goes for skipping tunes, but definitely the volume control. If you have the thing in your pocket, you have to take it out, punch one of the physical buttons to wake the display up and then unlock the touch screen by sliding your finger across it before you can finally see the volume up/down options.

3) They want $20 for a software update. Are you kidding me? The thing is only a couple of months old and I spent a pretty penny on it and you want to up-sell me for $20 to get the latest features that have nothing to do with the hardware and are just new software that you’ve added in. And by the way, people who today pay the same price that I did a couple months ago get it without the additional fee. I hate it when companies pull this shit.

Still, they thing is a bit of a marvel. When I was traveling around the holidays I was in the air on a flight watching a tv show I recorded with my DVR and then transfered over the personal screen of my iPod Touch. Thinking about this along with the fact that my grandmother was born before there was either television or commercial flight and fun to think about what the future has in store if we manage not to blow ourselves out of existence.

I’m on yet another trip. This time by car to North Alabama to visit the mom. Before I left I went to the library to see what books on cd were available and found “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown, which I haven’t read yet. Back in October, CJ loaned me a copy of Digital Fortress (also by Dan Brown) which I actually managed to find time to read. Even though there were a few pretty big flaws in its logic, I enjoyed the book and decided listening to the Da Vinci Code would be a nice way to spend the 20 hours or so of road time I would cover round trip.

The library CDs have seen a fair amount of use and a few are quite scratched up. I managed to get through most of them without missing but a few minutes collectively across the first seven disks. The eighth CD however was a different story. It simply would not play past the first couple of minutes. Luckily, I hit this CD shortly before I arrived so I simply spent the last little bit of the outbound trip listening to the radio instead.

Since the CD player I put in my car also plays MP3 CDs I figured I’d try to rip the rest of the thirteen CDs to MP3s for the return trip. One of the CD rippers I have (CDex) has some ability to do “Jitter correction” and also power through scratches. While there are a few little blank outs in the mp3 they are much more minimal than what was occurring while I was trying to listen to the original CDs. Not the easiest way to go about things, but it’s effective.

I plan on putting the MP3 CD in with the rest of them when I return it to the library. Maybe someone else can benefit from the little hack as well.

From an environmental perspective, I love rechargeable batteries. Not throwing old used batteries in a land file is very nice thing. Also, when I some day put solar panels on my roof, there won’t even be a carbon cost on the back end to get them juiced up. And, of course, there is the financial aspect that once you pay much less for a set of rechargeables and the electricity for a decent number of charges than you would for a comparable number of one time sets. The one gotcha that the rechargeables I own have is that they don’t really hold a charge.

The main thing I use the batteries for is to power my small on and off camera flashes. When they are fully charged up, the NiMH batteries do a great job of this. The problem is that I don’t shoot that often and with the battery leak, I pretty much have to plan a day in advance if I want to be able to use them. Otherwise, the last charge that I have given them is likely to be a few weeks in the past and the batteries won’t have enough juice in them to provide more than a few bursts of light.

Enter: Eneloop Rechargeable Batteries and their ilk. I recently saw about them in this Cool Tools post. Looks to have almost all the good parts, but the ability to hold a charge. I haven’t purchased any yet, but they will be on the way soon enough. I’m sure the technology will continue to improve, but for me, this is a really significant improvement and hopefully will be the start of a sea change that also means less stress on the environment and less toxic shit leaking from batteries into our ground water.