given that the vulnerability and the patches haven’t yet been released, does this constitute a “-1 day exploit?

Okay, now I’m just embarassed. I just heard about high dynamic range (HDR) photography from a NY Times article. I plead that it’s mostly just a trick and, hey, I primarily shoot slide film anyway. So for others who haven’t heard of HDR photography, it’s a technical work around for one of the more difficult photographic problems – the problem of the dynamic range of film vs that of the eye. In a nutshell, the human eye has an enormous dynamic range. It can distinguish between two different very bright shades while simultaneously distinguishing between two very dark shades. It’s dynamic range, IIRC, is somewhere around 10. On the other hand, slide film and prints from print film have a dynamic range of 5, maybe 6. That doesn’t sound like much difference, except that this is a logarithmic scale. ...

I read Getting Things Done about a year and a half ago. There’s a lot of good information in there, but frankly keeping all of the lists got to be too much. So I backed off a bit and started keeping lists for some things that came in via email, but that’s about it. Then luis posts about Tracks – a GTD web application. It looked fairly nifty, so I installed it and will give it a shot for awhile.

About a month ago, I was in Des Moines and talking with my mother. She asked me what I thought about immigration and I noted that I didn’t consider it a particular problem because immigration is natural and pretty much unstoppable. Due to my poor recollection, I can’t recall if I also noted that the U.S. has historically had a fairly decent view of immigration, much better than the proposals being floated around in congress. These proposals, ironically, are similar to the policies in Europe that recently led to rioting in France. A few weeks after I got back, the NY Times published a lengthy article on the economics of immigration which fairly summarized my views and even brought up some great information I hadn’t heard before. I sent it to my mother, and being the former English teacher that she is, she asked me to summarize it (aka, write a book report). So, here we go – a bit out of order from the original in order to better present the material, but basically a summary of “The Immigration Equation by Roger Lowenstein.

Went to the hardware store, couldn’t find the precisely the right single plumbing connector and had to get three separate pieces instead. Meaning, of course, that I now have twice as many joins and twice as many opportunities to leak. I put the pieces together, connected them to the filter, and no leaks! Apparently, plumbing is like my day job. The solution to most problems is a hardware upgrade.

In graduate school, I had a Chinese friend who used to say that he was destined to have plumbing problems because there was too much water in his name. Both his family name and his given name referenced water. This excess of water meant that he would always have plumbing problems. I sympathize with this notion. A few years ago, when I moved into my house, I installed a reverse osmosis filter in our kitchen for drinking water. When we came back from vacation, we found that the connection to the water tank was leaking. I spent a bit of time tightening up the connection, but it still leaked. This weekend, I got back to trying to fix it. So far, I’ve been to the hardware store twice, replaced the compression fitting three times and still it leaks. I’m heading to a larger hardware store this afternoon to find a replacement for the entire fitting – we’ll see if that works. If it doesn’t, then I may have to replace the entire tank. ...

Run for your lives! This is not a drill. My mother is loose in the blogosphere (hi mom!). To friends of mine noticing random, anonymous comments in their blogs, it’s not my fault – I swear. That is all. I now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet slack.

I like taking pictures. When it comes to outdoor/wildlife photography, I like taking lots of pictures. K and I went on vacation to Yellowstone for two weeks, getting back at the beginning of June. I wound up with 22 rolls of 36 exposure slide film. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s almost 800 slides. Considering the number of “37 exposure rolls I took, I feel safe calling it 800. ...

After 5+ years of doing image compression research back in the 90s, I get the strangest email requests. These usually come from students who are trying to get out of doing their own homework. Today’s example came with the subject line “plz help me. I almost deleted it as spam, but decided to take a look. hi respected sir, i am ******** **** and i am student of final year of electronics engineering i have given a project of image compression using JPEG and DCT in MATLAB if u can help me plz help me in this matter i shall be very thankful to u in this regard ihave just given very short time i have just left 3 days for it.if u can plz help me if u have code of the image compression plz give me i shall be very thankful to u.my email address is ********@gmail.com. if u know abt or u have than plz help me.plz.me will wait 4 ur response.plz help me.if u have some report on it plz do forward to me.i shall be very thankful to u in this regad. i realy need the code and REPORT or some documentation abt it plz do forward me.plz help me.plz ...

I wonder if these folks have read the recent article in the NY Times regarding prosopagnosia? The company Passfaces has a password replacement technology that uses the brain’s ability to recognize faces. The idea is that the user selects a set of faces. They are then presented with a series of options where each of their faces is hidden in a group of other faces. By correctly selecting their faces, they authenticate themselves. The company says that using Passfaces will reduce calls to a help desk because people can remember faces for years without seeing them. There’s a demo which allows you to test how easy the system is. ...