In fact, I could do him one better! I had the Sony VAIO PCG-C1VM, which had the Crusoe chip his employer Transmetta made at the time.
Half a decade later, and we both had the same dual 2GHz PowerMac G5s.
Today the Anime@UTS club had their Annual General Meeting, where we elected new members to the executive team, ate pizza and ice cream cake, watched Ace Attorney, and generally had a smashing time. It's the second AGM I've been a part of.
Behind closed doors, I was voted in as the club's new webmaster!
As the saying goes, I tend to mistrust any clubs that would have me as a member, but the execs, members and our illustrious president Alex have really created something special here, and I'm looking forward to contributing in a more meaningful way.
Thank you everyone for your vote of confidence ^_^
In 2007, it seemed all we read about in crypto circles were successful attacks against the MD5 and SHA family of hashing algorithms. Well after a six year contest, NIST is about ready to announce a suitable replacement to be dubbed SHA-3.
Interestingly, Bruce Schneier isn't so enthusiastic:
It’s not that the new hash functions aren’t any good, it’s that we don’t really need one. [..] We didn’t know [in 2006] how long the various SHA-2 variants would remain secure. But it’s 2012, and SHA-512 is still looking good.
That said, Skein and it's Threefish block cipher look really intriguing. I eschewed Rijndael/AES and use Twofish for all my personal crypto.
John C. Dvorak (the guy who also wrote this):
It is the notion that the phones will be in short supply that attracts my attention, though. This is because the whole idea screams “marketing ploy!”
“Apple is facing significant production constraints due to a move toward in-cell display technology [from LG and Japan Display],” Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays, wrote in a research note yesterday. “Apple is struggling to keep up with demand.”
The popular myth that Apple intentionally causes supply bottlenecks is conjecture at best, and belies a lack of understanding about manufacturing. My two cents, which I'd put towards buying an iPhone 5 if I weren't looking to head back to BlackBerry.
Over the weekend, a subdomain at the University of Technology Sydney was defaced, and with it the names and passwords of several staff members. What isn't being talked about much is: it was bound to happen.
Image of computers in UTS Building 10 taken by me in 2011.
According to Michael Lee of ZDNet Australia, the breach affected an older content management system (CMS) backend used to deliver news. Once the system was compromised, the information of staff members was published including their names, email addresses and their passwords as plaintext.
The site also had an ASCII art picture of Zoidberg from Futurama added, performing his trademark roar of exasperation. I see what they did there.
The good news is this breach did not affect the primary site, though it exposes a far larger issue.
When I first enrolled at UTS, I was surprised at how easy it was to choose subjects, set up my timetable and get started. Some of my fellow students may scoff at this, but having studied in several places, UTSs system is far superior. They may use Blackboard for everything else, but at least they had the common sense to keep clear of it for enrollment. But I digress.
The one part of the process that gave me pause was when I was prompted for a password. I proceeded to type in a unique passphrase that I'd be using for logging into UTS, only to be told it was too long.
Warning bells.
I've blogged at length about the risks of accessing sites with password character limits, and why they're technically unnecessary in a securely designed site. You can read about it here.
In a nutshell, passwords that are stored securely as a cryptographic hash have no technical reason to be limited in length. When a site informs you of a length limit, it's a fairly sure sign they're storing your password insecurely as plaintext, which means when there's a breach, your password is viewable. Like they were here.
UTS uses student passwords for administration, student email, the Blackboard Learn environment, WPA2 passwords for wireless access, Faculty of Engineering and IT access to student servers, login access to shared computers and many more places. I can appreciate the challenge of keeping all these the same, as students are unlikely to be willing to remember different passwords for each of these.
Still, for an institution of higher learning, I can't help but think they could solve this challenge securely. It dismays me when action is taken only as a result of a breach. I hope UTS uses this as an opportunity to revise their security policies.
She'd be 57 today. Fortunately, I had a suitably embarrassing photo from her birthday celebration in 2005 to share with all of you. Good thing she's not around or I'd receive a P.G. Wodehouse book to the face!
What I wouldn't give to celebrate this day with you again. I love you ♡
When trying to use HandBrakeCLI to take a clip from movie, I couldn't figure out why it was ignoring the durations in seconds I was defining with --start-at and --stop-at.
Turns out, you need to append the word "duration", "frame" or "pts" before each value. For example, to create a 20 second clip starting at the 1 minute mark:
HandBrakeCLI […] --start-at duration:60 --stop-at duration:20
Amazing what one can learn if one reads the manual page before wasting half an hour figuring out what's going wrong!
Do you all remember SCO? The Santa Cruz Operation? That phoenix of the Unix world that kept resurrecting in different forms to attack Linux? I was shocked to discover today it doesn't even exist anymore, or may as well not.
It was the early 2000s, and I was an IT-obsessed loner in high school with a part time job writing Perl scripts in Singapore. My favourite jazz arist Michael Franks had released his first (and entirely original) holiday album about aluminium stars for plastic trees. And The SCO Group had just launched its first lawsuit against IBM regarding Linux.
Seems like an age ago.
Regardless of your opinions of the company, SCO was fascinating. The first dedicated Unix company according to ESR, SCO sold several Unix operating systems for various architectures starting in the late 1980s. Caldera Systems was founded in 1994, and later acquired the rights to these OSs and supporting technologies, eventually changing their name to The SCO Group in 2001. If you're confused, don't worry, at the time a lot of us were too.
The SCO Group gained notoriety across the net in 2004 when the company asserted key portions of Linux had been copied from their proprietary Unix code. Ironically, Caldera Systems had released their own version of Linux in the past, essentially meaning the company had violated itself.
This lead to a series of lawsuits against IBM and several large companies that had used Linux. Novel countersued and claimed they'd never given SCO the rights to Unix, but had instead licenced it, and therefore their entire case was moot. After years of legal wrangling, the cases were eventually either dismissed or lost.
Groklaw, perhaps the world's most well known tech legal blog, has its roots in covering the story of these lawsuits.
Needless to say, despite the technical merits of the UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems, The SCO Group never recovered from these black eyes, and filed for Chapter 11 bankrupcy. Under American law, Chapter 11 gives a company the right to reorganise itself while being protected from it's creditors.
This was where I (and I suspect most of the world) lost interest and moved on several years ago. Well, there has been another development!
According to Wikipedia referencing a legal filing in Delaware, The SCO Group sold their assets to UnXis, a company I've never heard of before. The remaining shell of a company renamed themselves the TSG Group, and last month announced they'd filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy instead.
Chapter 7 means you’ve given up the ghost and are shutting down. But not SCO. They want the litigation with IBM to continue. But there’s almost no money left.
I have this mental image of a guy struggling up a steep hill, gasping for breath.
In any event, I belabour all of this to show you a screenshot of the new owners of the SCO Group's website. From what I can tell, they merely kept the same design and navigation as before, but changed the logos to this up-scaled monstrosity.
Far be it for me to critisise someone else's site design when my own site looks like this, but still. A highly compressed JPEG with artifacting, a scaled logo in the centre, grey boxes around everything, off centered dropdown menus. Even their feedback form throws a untrusted site certificate error!
The site design doesn't instil much confidence. All of this looks to me like an operation in name only; either that or this is a very temporary transition site before they unveil something new. UnixWare and OpenServer are decent products, it's a shame they're being let down by a site such as this.
I wonder what the future holds for these companies? Wouldn't it be funny if the companies went bust and they released their software as free/open source? ;)
A cross post from my latest entry on the Anime@UTS club blog ^_^
When your humble blogger here wrote (no wait, typed!) his last Music Monday post about one of the themes from InuYasha, fellow Anime@UTS club member Kirishima was so happy to have some classic anime here again, we've decided to dedicate more posts to this time period in Japanese animation! Well, the music in this time period of Japanese animation. With this in mind, let's explore this rather nostalgic (and porky) tune.
While intending to write this during the morning, a certain member of the anime club who had volunteered to write the post you're reading now fell into a predictable trap that snags most university students: university work! It's as if your author is going to university for reasons other than being an active member of the Anime@UTS club or something! How stupid is that?
In any event, in keeping with the time of evening this post is being written, we're taking a more relaxed tone with one of my favourite theme songs — for any series in any medium from any country ever — of all time.
Everyone remembers their first Ghibli movie. Bar none. Well, other than those who don't frequent bars. Like me. Not Me, me. Stop putting words in my mouth. There's a pun about pork in there somewhere.
I'll admit I watched most of Hayao Miyazaki's creative genius fairly recently, but the one movie of his I saw many, many years ago was Porco Rosso. It was one of those times where I didn't make the mental connection until years later, much like I watched Star Trek Voyager for years before realising I was a part of the fandom and went back and retroactively watched The Next Generation and and… I think we'll stop there.
Behold, a relaxing piano rendition of the ED from Porco Rosso, the classic 1992 movie that's now 20 years old. I suddenly feel ancient :')
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdU4E-JZJeo
So beautiful! I've always been a sucker for piano, but the melody and subtle hook in Toki ni wa Mukashi no Hanashi wo (Once in a While, Talk of the Old Days) gets me every… single… time. MANLY TEARS :')
Of course, I would be remiss if I also didn't include this video of Eminence performing the tune at SMASH! 2007, right here in Sydney!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNYKf1OT2k4
One of these days I'll have to write a full length blog post about Porco Rosso, even after seeing plenty of other Ghibli films, I'm pretty sure this one is still my favourite. Though that's not to say it doesn't have some pretty stiff competition!
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to dream about my childhood and blue skies to the sound of gentle music :)
