The Most Epic Time of Year

Blogger's post scheduling seems to be failing recently, so pardon the upcoming swarm of posts.

It's a wonderful time of year. Not because of the heat. Not because of a few extra days off from work. Not because of the fact that it seems to be the busiest time of year (in spite of the fact that the girls are out of school, no softball, no dancing, no Wednesday activities at church, no CBS, no VBS).

It's actually a wonderful time of year in spite of the fact that most sports radio stations insist it's the worst time of year - NBA playoffs are over, college world series is over, Stanley Cup playoffs are over, and no NFL teams are in training camp. (Any day without NFL discussion is a good one, but I digress). So what makes this a wonderful time of year?

Le Tour de France

Yes, it's the time of year when I become a racing fan all over again. It's the time of year when Versus carries cycling every day, twice a day for long periods. 21 days of learning. 21 days of captivating racing. 21 days of wondering who will wear the yellow jersey, the green jersey, the polka-dot jersey, and the white jersey. 21 days of seeing a microcosm of multi-party warfare take place over a four hour period as competing teams work out unspoken, temporary treaties in order to make temporary gains over the peloton. 21 days of watching futile breakaway groups expend an enormous amount of energy in order to only be swallowed up by the peloton whenever the peloton decides it's the right time to do it.

I first learned a lot of the cycling terminology and a cursory interest in the sport when I was young. My friend from down the street would ride road bikes with his dad on the weekends, so I got to see just how narrow the tires are. He also knew all the vernacular and taught it to me and how the peloton saves energy for the bunch in the middle. At the time, about the only time you could see cycling on television was on CBS on Saturday they would have a week recap with lots of melodramatic music by John Tesh. Ahhh...those were the days - but I had to wait until the weekends to find out of 7-11 or Greg LeMond had done well the week before.

Then in about 2002, this Lance Armstrong thing started to get really big. It certainly didn't hurt that we lived in Texas at the time. But we started watching on cable every night, the day's racing. At the time it was covered by OLN (which later became Versus). We watched every opportunity we got. And we loved it. We learned it. We learned the names of the racers, what their strengths were and their weaknesses. And of course, we had a cyclist to cheer for.

After 2005, a few different things happened. We happened to be camping or away from home during the Tour. And a long string of doping incidents really made the sport look silly as entire teams were banned from the race. But mostly, we weren't home and around when it was on. All of our "non-Lance" favorites were kicked out of the race for just being on the right teams, regardless of whether they had been tested positive or not.

This year, we're hooked again. Certainly, Lance Armstrong has something to do with it. But I'm so much more interested in so many other riders. I'm riveted by Mark Cavendish who can't seem to lose a sprint when he gets near the front. His team, Columbia/HTC are incredibly well-organized. I'd love to see Tyler Farrar, an up-and-coming American cyclist, possibly win a stage (although he's a sprinter, and if Columbia/HTC is on their game, he can't possibly beat Mark Cavendish). I'm eager to see who will be chosen as the leader of Astana. While I was excited to see Lance Armstrong in a group of 26 or so that pulled away from the peloton with 25k to go today, I would be interested to see Alberto Contador as the leader and see how well Armstrong fares as his lieutenant or a domestique.

So there's plenty to be excited about this time of year.

A Nation's Strength

A Nation's Strength - Ralph Waldo Emerson

What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

Happy Independence Day!

Making Stop Motion for Next to Nothing

I promised I'd teach you how to make the video K and I made in the previous post. I'm guessing there's equivalent free software for Windows, so poke around and see what you come up with. On Mac, it's just too easy because iLife comes with any Mac since like, oh, 2000 or so. I'm using iLife '08, which is drastically different from iLife '06, but I believe '09 is more similar to '08. YMMV.

K did a really good job of getting all the still shots onto one SD card, all with the same settings, and the whole thing done on the same day, so it loaded in pretty quickly. I just popped the SD card into a little reader, popped it into a USB port, opened iPhoto, and iPhoto found it and asked if I wanted to import. I selected all the photos for the stop motion video, made it a single event, and gave the event a name. Once the photos are loaded into iPhoto, you're done with iPhoto.

Next was to start up iMovie. This is the part that is far different from iMovie HD ('06). iMovie HD gave you much more control over durations, frame counts, audio fading and cross-fading. But for the very simple videos we're making, it was quite adequate. Fire up iMovie, select File, New Project, (or hit ⌘N), give your project a name, and select Standard as your aspect ratio (unless you're using a wider shot on your camera). Before you start loading photos, you want to change one setting - click on File, Project Properties (⌘J), and in the third section, select Applies to all Photos, and in the Initial Photo Placement, select Fit in Frame (the Ken Burns effect is really neat, but totally what we need for a stop-motion video).

To start loading photos, in the control bar in the middle of the screen, on the right side, there's a listing of media you can add.  Click the camera icon.  Under iPhoto, click Events, then find your event you created.  Drag the entire event icon into the composition pane (where it says "Drag media here"  Once all the photos are loaded, you're one change away from having the video portion done.  On the timeline, on the lower left corner of any photo, click the little watch icon.  Or click an image to select the whole strip, go to Edit, Set Duration (⌘R). In the Duration box, enter 0.25 and select Applies to All Photos.

From there, it's just a matter of dragging in the music you want, making some little adjustments to timing, and adding credits if you want. Easy schnappen.

Stop Motion Legos I

While camping with Grandma and Grandad was great fun, K and L have spent their summer being constantly amused or busy with something. The past few days have been lazy with no real plans (I like that), but because they've grown accustomed to constant stimulation, K and L are going a bit crazy with it - particularly K or sometimes forgets that she has lots of ways to amuse herself.

When I was a kid, when there was nothing to do, we'd invent ways to have fun. I remember trying to build several cars as a child - none of them worked out, but I did learn some valuable lessons. Paper plates can't support the weight of a 4-year old, so they don't make very good wheels on your cardboard box car. When you only have four pieces of 2x4, it's probably not enough to make a cart out of because the steering axle has to be independent of the frame. And finally, making a proper steering system is hard - a simple axle on a center axis doesn't work too well.

One of the things I showed her in the past that was a great deal of fun for her at the time was stop motion video. I explained how full-motion video is basically stop motion video, just really, really fast. (We didn't go into telecine, frames, fields, interlacing, etc.) Previously I had done all the work on a brief stop-motion video just to get K to understand the concept.

Last night K was getting a bit frustrated with L's means of amusement (frustrating K is very amusing for L), so I decided to give K a solo project for awhile. She has a really old, cheap digital camera (the kind that would cost like $15 if you bought it new today), and a memory card. I told her to make a stop-motion video. She immediately gravitated toward stuffed animals because that's what we had done in the past. The one last night was cute, but this morning, with no motivation (other than the fact that she and I had talked about Legos in stop-motion video last night) got up and shot the 139 frames necessary to make this little video. Pretty cool, if you ask me.

In a later post, I'll tell you how you can make that video on the cheap without special software other than what comes on your Mac (you are using a Mac, right?)

Scare Tactics

A friend of mine tweeted not long ago that one of his online accounts had been suspended due to "hackers". This probably means that his account had been compromised and that hackers were using his account for spamming. It happens often. (Not as often, however, as the number of times you'll receive a fake email saying your account had been compromised by hackers.)

I've mentioned password databases in the past, but the post made me decide that it might be necessary to do my part to talk my very few readers into using proper internet hygiene. But this time, I'm going to have to resort to scare tactics. Now, this could happen....

Suppose that the account you let get compromised because of a simple password is Facebook. Innocuous, right?

• Attacker gets your Facebook account
• Facebook has your email address
• Attacker does a bit of internet looking up to determine who your email provider is (if necessary)
• You probably use the same password for your email as your Facebook, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this because you're already convinced you need to use a password database
• If the above does not apply, the attacker can gather from your Facebook account your spouse or significant other's name, date of birth, anniversary, children's names, birth dates, etc. that you use for all your other passwords
• Or they can figure out where you went to high school, which is the secret question you use to unlock your Yahoo email account when you forget the password there
• Attacker logs into your personal email
• Where your financial institutions email you
• And you use the same password for all of those
• And you get emails from a hundred other sites
• Including your LinkedIn
• Which tells where you work
• Then one of those many many sites allows you to post arbitrary HTML comment - like a blogging site
• So the attacker makes a blog post with some image tags that your browser will load
• Only they're not images, they're a series of references that your browser will use to change your router configuration to open up the dirty side to configuration
• Then one of those sites also tells what IP address you log in from (or the attacker could just use one more image tag in the attack above to get your router's IP address
• So now your home router is configured so that anybody on the internet can configure it (including the attacker), and the attacker knows the configuration password
• So the attacker configures your router to open up a bunch of ports
• Including some Windows ones that they can use to map drives
• And they have read access to your computers on your home network

Did you see the item above that says "installs malware"? No? Because they didn't have to. Just from the stuff you have available on that one compromised account, the attacker can learn a great deal about you.

So the moral of the story is to use a password database. If you only use a Mac, just use Keychain. If you use only Windows, use Keepass. If you use a variety of platforms, use KeepassX. If you don't want to install some new piece of software, use a pencil and a piece of paper (yes - I said it). It's more important that you use different passwords for all sites with a high degree of complexity than it is that you only have the password in your brain.

While this may seem far-fetched, it is possible, and attackers do use those sorts of tactics to gain more information about you and those you do business with. Several years ago, I used a similar password on many, many internet sites. When I found out that one of my accounts had been compromised, I immediately went and changed passwords on all my other accounts because I knew there was other information to be had.

It's Funnier if You Don't Know

I try to remember a certain kind of story. The kind of story that's really, really funny to just hear or witness, but you don't know the history behind it. They're funny because they seem to defy all logic and make no sense that they happen. The thing is, there's probably a logical explanation for why the thing happened, but if you knew what the logical reason was, the story wouldn't be funny anymore.

For example....

Ours is a new neighborhood. It's still being built out. In one of the units that was just getting the finishing touches one Saturday, there was a Chevy Astro van out front. You know the kind - the ones with the ladder on top, the cone on the front, and the metal cages inside to keep the tools from sliding around. The ones with the bumper sticker on the back with the fleet number and the 800-number to call if the guy's got road rage. The plain white Chevy Astro with Moe's HVAC, Smiley's Glass Service, or Smith Small Appliance Repair. Only this one was a Domino's Pizza cargo van. It was very clearly Domino's logo on the side of the van, and the back of it continued the logo. It had the ladder, the cone, the cage, the bumper sticker - you name it. It was a cargo van through and through - from Domino's Pizza. I used to work at Domino's - the supplies even in the little town I worked at even got a big rig. So why the cargo van? And why at somebody's house (not the resident?) Don't answer it, because the story isn't funny if you know why.

My favorite one, though, I have to change names to protect the guilty. I like the victim here plenty - I have a great deal of respect for him. But the story is too funny - and if I were to know why things happened this way, it wouldn't be funny anymore....

A couple of years ago, we interviewed Robert E. Lee (not the Robert E. Lee - remember - names are changed to protect the guilty). The resume said Robert E. Lee, the guy shook hands with us and introduced himself as Robert. We called him Robert during the interview. We talked about hiring him and he was Robert. My manager called Robert back to ask Robert some more questions. And that was the last I ever heard of Robert.

I went on vacation for a week. When I came back from vacation, I was cleaning the inbox, getting caught up on things, and generally trying to recover from the absence from the office. I got a call from my manager telling me that I needed to go ask Earl some question, or find out how Earl was doing on some piece of work. I had never heard of Earl. I had no clue who Earl was.

Me: "Who's Earl?"
Manager: "The new guy"
Me: "On whose team?"
Manager: "Ours"
Me: "Wait - I was supposed to be involved in the process and tell you how I felt. I didn't interview Earl"
Manager: "Yes you did"
I shuffle through all the resumes
Me: "No I didn't"
Manager: "Oh right - look at the resume for Robert E. Lee"
Me: "Oh - I thought he was Robert"
Manager: "His wife made him change his name to Earl"

So for some reason, the guy we interviewed as Robert suddenly became Earl because his wife said his name was Earl. After going to lunch with the guy a few times and talking about various technology or vacations or fun activities, Earl would often say things like "I'd love to, but my wife won't let me." So I've got this vision in my head of Robert coming home from work one day and his wife sewing new nametags into the all guy's boxers. "Your name is Earl, now, and that's final!" "Yes Dear..."

Several months later something came up with my manager about the same thing. And my manager told me he found out the story there. I told him to never tell me why - because the story just wouldn't be funny if I knew why Robert became Earl.

Snow Leopard worth it?

In September, Apple is set to release Snow Leopard, the next revision
to Mac OS X. While Apple certainly does their capitalist duty in
hyping up the updated OS, Apple fans as a whole are less than
impressed with the very short list of new features.

There are two reasons I'm really excited about Snow Leopard, however.
And while I'm a fan of many things Apple, I dong think this is just
typical Apple fanboy speak.

First is the thing Apple I'd touting as the major sales point -
performance. While I don't recall ever complaining about general
performance in the OS in the past, particularly in Finder, this one
thing is a very big selling point to me. "Why," you may ask, "is
performance important to you now when it wasn't important two days
ago?" To go a bit into the technology, Leopard (the current version of
the OS) included some new tools for developers. One of the most
important was a set of API's and tools originally written by Sun
called DTrace. The aim of DTrace is to make it easier for developers
to monitor their applications for performance (among other things).
That Apple is dramatically improving speed in common tools like Finder
is evidence that they're "eating their own dog food". Also, the new OS
is supposed to take about half the space. (It could probalbly do this
without major code rewrites already by eliminating Universal
binaries). Furthermore, the kernel is supposed to be compiled 64-bit
for running in true 64-bit mode on core-2 duo processors. All of these
things are important to me because dramatic performance tuning I'd
evidence of something larger - code quality. Others may frown at a
"major update" with "few new features", but to me, that Apple has
spent the last six months working on code quality is HUGE. Almost as
huge as when Microsoft stopped writing code for 6 weeks so they could
give every single developer security training.

The second major point for me is price. While Apple comes out with
somewhat frequent updates to the OS, upgrading is not cost
prohibitive. Snow Leopard is supposed to be a $29 upgrade ($49 for a
family pack of up to 5). Not a bad price for something you rarely see
in the release notes of any software, not just operating systems.
Major relaeses are generally $129/$199.