Month: April 2006

Code Monkey!

By AMH

If you have ever enjoyed anything I have linked to, you will go listen to the song Code Monkey (just click on the “Code Monkey” link under the blurb). It is birlliant and true and funny and I am geeking out to this song in my office, to the dismay of the student who just came by to ask a question. I actually acquired a code monkey of my own last summer (he is purple and plush and from Seattle, as many good code monkeys are), and perhaps I’ll finally bring him in to the office with me tomorrow.

Beauty, Power, Advertising

By AMH

Hosted at the University of Vermont, this Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose has a nice discussion of the issues in advertising portrayals of female beauty with a combination of scholarly references and good imagery. Worth checking out – it may not be Killing Us Softly, but it’s an interesting read. I particularly like the photoshop job they do in the first few slides.

Hardware Keylogger

By AMH

A number of people pointed out the Key Katcher at ThinkGeek to me yesterday. I”d love to get my hands on one of these to try it out, but it seems very simple. I wondered how long it would take the average user to generate 130,000 keystrokes – how easy or frequent does rerieval need to be if you’re hoping to catch a password? Of course, the product description doesn’t mention that as a use, focusing on putting it on your own machine to identify if an unauthorized user accessed it, or for sys admins to use to see what … Continue reading Hardware Keylogger

Spirit in safety

By AMH

If you’ve been following the Mars Rover news at all lately, you’ll be excited to hear that, desipte its broken wheel and having to drive backwards, Spirit has reached a hill that will get enough sun to power the rover all winter. In addition, they think that there may be some interesting science to do in its resting spot, and will be able to keep the rover busy without risking moving it during the short winter days.

Exterrestrial Bed Coverings

By AMH

I’ve been meaning to look into how the image search engine Pixsy actually works, as it’s been getting a lot of attention. I poked around on their site and couldn’t find any explanation of their methods, but from trying out some searches, it doesn’t appear that they are doing any actual image processing, just doing text processing for text and tags in proiximity to images they are indexing. This theory is supported by my discovery that the top 5 out of 12 image results on the query term “ufo” are pictures of quilts. Which absolutely cracks me up in how … Continue reading Exterrestrial Bed Coverings

OMG!!! Ponies!!!

By AMH

I do not like personal April Fools Day pranks, but I do enjoy the inevitable internet hoaxes and website redesigns. I ran into a couple yesterday just surfing around, but it turns out that Wikipedia has an entry listing 2006 April Fool’s hoaxes, including a link to a screenshot of my favorite (even though I feel a little guilty for finding it so funny). If you scroll to the bottom, you can find entries on the notable April Fool’s hoaxes from the past six years as well.