Yeraze's Domain 3.0

That’s “chic” as in tres chic.

Anyway, I was digging around the net today and somehow wound up in the land of Scottevest.com. I’ve heard about this company for years, and Friends of mine and myself have long thought about getting a vest from them. People who know me know that all I almost always wear cargo khaki’s because it’s the most comfortable way for me to carry my cell phone, pda, swiss army knife, wallet, keys, and lots of unnecessary change. Trying to cram it all into jeans kept blowing out pockets, and something like the Scottevest seemed the perfect solution. Independant of pants, so I can wear clothes for actual “style” instead of function. Of course, I am a geek so I have no fashion sense, but that’s why I’m married

Anyway, as long as I’ve thought about getting one, I’ve never been able to justify the high price tag of something that’s really just not that necessary and just screams “GEEK” to everyone in a 10 block radius. But now I see they’re having a huge sale because it’s their 5th anniversary, so prices are cut and I thought I’ld check em out. Low and behold, they’ve got some really sweet stuff now. Items like the Tactical 4.0 with Solar Support, yes I said “Solar” support. As in it has solar panels attached to the back and a power converter & battery in the lining, that comes with adapters to charge up devices connected to the internal jacket network. Now that’s just so incredibly geeky to be kewl.

Granted, for one of the true “uber” jackets it’s still like $600, but they have more reasonable options like the 237D with “3 season support”, meaning the sleeves detach for warmer weather. It’s a fun idea, but I can only imagine the kind of ridicule Laura would inflict upon my humble self if I actually donned one of these things. But while you’re thinking about it, be sure to check out their awesome iPod commercial spoof and some of their other television appearances for what it looks like “in action”.

Laura says I haven’t been posting any “personal” stuff lately, and from looking through the posts over the last month or so I can see she’s right, so here’s what’s going on in the Hand Family.

The short story: Life is good. Rhianna’s been having a blast at daycare. She’s made friends with a girl named “Jordan”, and the first thing she does every morning when I drop her off is run over to her where they hug and then run off to play. Laura’s been doing great at her new job, and has made herself invaluable. There was a major screwup at the clinic involving a rather sizable chunk of change, and when they found out that Laura can read charts (She is an AHIMA accredited Health Information tech afterall), she got first dibs. Long story short, she’s become quite famous amongst the people who sign the paychecks. As for me, I’m doing great at ERDC. I’ve made some major breakthroughs with VTK and Paraview, and have even started contributing back. Plus this is an acquisition year for us, so I’m sure I’ll have some fun new Hardware articles in a few months.

On the home front, things are also going well. The house has proven to be an excellent investment. I’m starting to become quite the Mr. Fix-it around here, fixing doors that won’t close and unclogging toilets. There hasn’t (thank goodness) been any drama like the flood in the front yard again, but there’s an interesting aside to that. During that torrential downpour, our neighbor’s house flooded. Like on the inside, wet carpet & damaged floor. He moved in only shortly before us, but in the last 6 months or so his house flooded 5 times he said. He asked around and everyone gave him the same response: “You mean you didn’t know? It floods every rain, yea”. With a little research he found out that the previous owners had a disclosure statement indicating that it flooded regularly, but for some reason it was never shown to him to sign. So he got a lawyer & took it to court, and it was very quickly settled out of the court. The result: The original tenants bought the house back, and bought him a new house. Needless to say, Laura & I quickly checked our papers, but no such luck. We like the place anyway, so we’re happy.

Jeremy stopped by over the Christmas holidays and stayed for a few hours, visiting with Rhianna for a bit. I don’t think she remembered him, but she sure did enjoy the company nonetheless. Word around the office is that I’ll be heading up to Starkville for a meeting at the ERC early March, so maybe I can get me some original Little Dooey’s and visit with some of the old gang. As for Patrick, Rob, & Kris, haven’t heard much of them as of late. So come on guys, post away, 2 of you have blogs so update em already!

If you check my Published Work page you’ll see it’s had a bit of a face-lift. I was goofing around on Google and noticed that some new patent information has come out that finally lists myself (and various other Z-Kat’ers) as the Inventors!

So now, if you go to the US Published Application Full-Text Database Search site and search for “Randall” and “Hand” as the Inventory name, viola!
Four patents, or patent applications at least. It’s better than nothing, I suppose

Ever since the Sony Rootkit debacle, I’ve been pretty paranoid about adware and viruses. I manually update my Norton Antivirus about 3 times a week (although they only seem to update about once a week), and run Spybot S&D and AdAware almost daily.

Well, today I have a new product to watch out for : Star Force. Have you recently installed a game or application in Windows, and for no known reason it required you to reboot? It didn’t install DirectX, and it’s not a device driver, so why would you have to reboot? Well, StarForce is why. It operates as a hidden device driver in Windows, and from what I can tell it wreaks all kinds of havoc on most systems. BoyCott Starforce has the details, but it seems it does everything from plain old system instability to rendering CD/DVD Writers useless by causing IDE errors & intermittent slowdowns. From their site:

It gets better…

Bingo Bango Bongo.. it’s the Sony DRM Rootkit Fiasco all over again. Uninstalling the driver is near-impossible, without the secret tool from StarForce (which the guys on the boycott site have, thank goodness). And of course, removing this unwanted piece of junk will render the software useless on a good day, turn your computer into a paperweight on a more likely day. Great…

I can’t say for certain, but I’m willing to bet it’s not on the box either: “Deluxe Edition, with StarForce! For your Protection!”

Update Just checked my PC at home, and I’ve got it. Don’t know from where, the only game I’ve played in their list is Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, and that was almost 2 months ago. Neither Norton nor any of my Spyware tools picked up on it, so it seems there’s really no automatic detection methods working for it. I downloaded the Uninstall tool and it seems to have removed it.. I’ll post more if I find any more problems..

Update #2 Just to give a “clear and balanced” picture here (and to avoid getting sued for libel), the same guy (Mark Russinovich) who exposed Sony’s DRM was evidently tasked with checking StarForce and and No Root-kits found. Evidently Star-force even has a contest running with $10000 to the first person to find & demonstrate the destruction of a CD/DVD burner. So maybe it’s all bunk & overreacting, but I still take issue with anything installing Ring-0 Device Drivers without my knowledge. If said drivers can actually elevate priviledges, seems like it’s just asking for a virus like the Backdoor.IRC.Synd to exploit it.

Today Laura & I went and picked up Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, the Family Guy movie that was created while they were off the air.

It comes in both a censored & uncensored version, both of which are absolutely hilarious. It’s definately not safe for TV, but fans of the show will recognize a few of the smaller skits have shown up in the latest season. It doesn’t hold anything back, either, everything from why they were off the air to religion to Tivo winds up in the crosshairs. It’s good for a laugh, and a must-have for fans. Definately 5 of 5.

Found this interesting link while doing some “recreational reading” on the internet.

There’s a magician in the UK named Derren Brown who is essentially their response to David Blaine. Specializing in “Mentalism” and Hypnotism, his “stunts” seem to consist of primarily hypnotizing people without their knowledge to do strange things or hypnotizing himself to do unusual things like memorizing entire decks of cards. You can find some neat video clips of his work Here.

What really intruiged me, however, was a segment about a “Real Life Zombie Video Game”. Essentially, he creates an arcade game of a zombie horror experience (a la Resident Evil) and waits for someone to play it. When they do, he uses carefully timed strobes to induce a catatonic state. While they player is out cold, they transfer him to a nearby building which is a duplicate of the environment in the game, and when they snap out of their trance they find themselves living the video game. This poor guy loses it after a few minutes. Then even more interestingly, they induce another catatonic state and transfer him back to the pub with the arcade cabinet and wake him up, and he things the whole thing was in the game.

It’s an interesting example of Suspension of Disbelief, where he’s absolutely terrified while it’s happening but quickly justifies it as “fun” once it’s over. But, more interestingly, is it real or is this a scam? First impressions had me thinking it’s a scam, but checking this guys previous stunts it just might be real. I’m still undecided, but I have to wonder why I haven’t heard of stuff like this before? If it’s so trivial for a street magician to do this, then why haven’t I ever heard about it in the news or in school?

Update Slightly better video, with a little bit of the “intro” to the show, is here

Found two neat Flash gimmicks today that I thought I would share.

First off is “The Ultimate Showdown” at this link :
http://uploads.ungrounded.net/285000/285267_ultimateshowdown.swf (Might need to cut-n-paste the URL as HTTP Referer’s seem to be blocked). Sponsored by the folks at FlashPortal, it’s a catchy song about the the ultimate showdown between “good buys, bad guys, and explosions”, complete with a tribute to Chuck Norris.

The second neat find is PocketMod: The free Disposable personal organizer. It’s essentially a flash-tool for creating a simple organizer with scheduling, lists, and contact info, and then printing it on a plain 8.5×11 sheet of paper and folding it into a neat easy-to-use form. It’s a clever, albeit simple product, but it’s a clean and neat design that I might even try out a time or two. Let’s face it: Like they say on the website, real PDA’s are fragile and expensive when just pen-and-paper will do. Most people, myself included, just lack the discipline to effectively organize things on paper, and this helps.

As reported in today’s Clarion Ledger, “Clinton earns government honor” for “excellence in government”. Evidently our elected officials are so efficient and kind that other elected officials decided to give them an award and a pat on the back.

Of course, they neglect to mention that this is the same government that last year took a Fight over a treehouse to the State Supreme Court to the tasty tune of $30,000 worth of taxpayer’s money. It’s also the same government that’s currently looking into new laws that would outlaw open garage doors, restrict driveways to less than 50% of your front yard, and make parking on our own front yards a finable offense.

Why doesn’t stuff like this ever wind up on The Daily Show ? I wanna see Stephen Colbert do a special report on this.

Found this neat app via Boing Boing.

OGLE is a free open-source plugin developed by the Eyebeam R&D group to work with GLIntercept (Another Free open-source tool). Essentially, anything that gets rendered to your screen via OpenGL, it will let you save to disk as an OBJ file for easy import into any modeling package. He has some really neat examples of grabbing geometry from World of Warcraft and then actually using a Stereolithography printer to create a physical model of his character. He also uses it with Google Earth to grab geometry of buildings from major cities.

A neat application with some useful applications, especially for where I work. It does have some limitations, but it’s a v0.1 product so I expect more work to be done with it. It has trouble with Display Lists and Vertex Programs, and it won’t grab Textures (geometry only). Still, it’s a great find.

Out of boredom today I dug around the found the website for the Vis2006 conference in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s a pretty underwhelming website, huh? Especially given how pretty the Vis05 website was.

Well, along with that website I found the website for the Vis06 Visualization Design Contest, this year focusing on earthquake data. They’ve got some new guys running the contest this year, and I’m pretty impressed to already see the data online. They’ve even gone so far as to setup an Contest Mailing List this year, even though it’s pretty quiet. But I’m most surprised by the submission requirements:

So you have to burn all your stuff to CD & DVD, and then mail it? Hasn’t anyone here ever heard of the Internet? So now on top of having time to do the work, you have to have access to a Digital Video Camera with Transfer capabilities, and video editing equipment for burning DVD’s. Worse than that, look at the Tasks:

I guess they forgot that it’s a visualization contest, and not a geology contest.

I was kinda looking forward to entering this year, since I had a better feeling of what i’m up against after last year. But if they’re requiring all of this extra garbage, and if one of the judging requirements is “I could implement this and get these same pictures and know what settings to put on all of the parameters” (for “Completeness” judging), then they’ve just eliminated any custom code and are basically saying you have to go COTS. Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be entering this year.