Smile Shutter

Found out about a funny feature in some of the new cameras from Sony: the Smile Shutter. It can measure the smile of your subjects and take a picture only they are properly smiling.

I wonder whether I can go over 100% One of my friends has such a camera, so we will give it a try soon. Hope it doesn’t explode

I also wonder about the future evolution of this feature; what is it going to do? Detect fake smiles? sarcastic smiles? evil smiles? wistful smiles? retail smiles? stewardess smiles? …

(I found out about this feature from the blog of a friend)

Two Hardware Hacks from Princeton

Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

The paper and more materials

 
 

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

The paper and more materials

In more recent news: Diebold voting machine key copied from pic on Diebold site

Buy a Mac, Get an iPod Nano

Now in Germany too

Got New MacBook Pro

Der Pechvogel

The bad luck with my MacBook continues, less than 24h before finally getting rid of it. The harddisk (a 80GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2) stopped working today while I was reinstalling the operating system so that my sister has a clean system. Fortunately, all my data is safely backed up. Still this made me really angry.

Life’s tough … Get a helmet !!

My Laptop Broke

… again. The fourth time actually. I am so pissed off, probably I shouldn’t be posting anything until I calm down.

Feb 22 10:42:25 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 3
Feb 22 12:28:01 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 3
Feb 22 13:02:50 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 3
Feb 22 13:17:27 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 3
Feb 22 19:06:43 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 3
Feb 22 20:02:14 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: 3

[Added 2007-03-03] My laptop restarted all by itself (instantaneously, like power was out) 3 times in 3 days, then for 5 days it worked without any problems. Don’t really know what to think, if this does not happen again it will be quite hard to convince the apple service guys that this is a real problem. Anyway, now there are even more problems with DVDs, and also the older unfixed ones related to sleep mode.

ModBook: The Mac Tablet

While it’s unlikely that Apple will ever release a Mac tablet, soon there will be one: the ModBook. Planned to be released in April 2007 by Axiotron, the ModBook is the fusion of a MacBook with a Wacom tablet. Seems like a nice gadget, for those who can afford it ($2279-$2849). What I don’t like about the ModBook is that it can only be used as a tablet, with no way to open it, rotate the screen and use it as a normal laptop. For it’s size this is quite strange. Do they expect you to carry both your tablet and your laptop with you every day?

[2007-01-23] Looked for alternatives to this thing: they are called “Interactive Pen Displays” and it seems they are a lot cheaper (unless you really want this 21” one). Sure, they are not sporks, so no MacBook included.

iPod Sport Kit

Some Things About IBM

Only after my visit to Stuttgart I realize how little I knew about IBM. Only on the night before my trip I shortly looked at their Wikipedia entry. So what did I know before:

• IBM stood for Identical Blue Men, so I was expecting all their employees to wear suits.
• Their involvement with open source software: Linux, Eclipse, Derby, Geronimo, Harmony etc.
• Their hardware, especially the mainframes, which I always associated with maintaining very old programs written in languages like COBOL and Fortran.
• Their scary patents. Scary because of the extremely bad reputation software patents have among developers.
• The fact that they have a highly regarded research lab in Zurich.

Here are some things I hardly knew anything about:

• IBM is a business services company. More than half of their revenues comes from services, not from software or hardware as many would expect. However, they are so big that they are still the largest hardware company in the world, and the second largest software company after Microsoft. Approximatively 330,000 employees in 170 countries, 91 billion dollars in revenues, and almost 10 billions in profit per year – quite amazing numbers.
• Their five most important software projects are: WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, Rational and Tivoli. Even if I heard about them before, these names might not tell you anything. This is all corporate software, so you won’t find any of it selling at Metro. Also their focus is on solutions for the problems or their clients, and not so much on product branding.
• What gives IBM the edge over their competitors is innovation. During the years IBM employees have earned five Nobel Prizes and four Turing Awards. And even if I don’t quite like this measure of innovation: they are by far the company with the most patents in the world.
• Their corporate culture is very much based on “employee growth”. IBM offers career opportunities for managers, but also for technical-oriented employees.
• Not everybody wears a suit at IBM. Actually, seems like only managers and the people who have contact with the clients wear suits. Technical people wear jeans and casual clothes.