Archive for August, 2006

Sometimes, technique will give bend towards art. I found a web site that computes a graphical representation of a web site structure. It’s beautiful enough to surprise you.

You can click on the thumbnails to see the flowers in their full bloom.
Roumazeilles.net
Sirenomelia.org
SpamAnti.net
lexyk.com

There’s everything here: Complexity, groupings, organisation, contents. But this leads to a kind of identity card of each of these web sites.

As if they had each their own face.

It has been a long time since I started to tell you about the lack of HDMI-ready PC graphics cards on the market. It leads to the impossibility to display correctly HD-TV from a HD-DVD or BluRay DVD from your PC (even with the most powerful graphics cards). But, today, MSI announces such a card. Few details, but it should be available within a month (maybe two months in order to get it on the cheaper markets).

If you want to create a new web site, the first step is to get a domain name. For the example I’ll use in the coming tutorial, Lexyk.com is the name of the domain I’ll use for a dictionary web site I am currently creating. Without it, no visitor will ever find your web site because typing http://192.168.1.1/ is usually not the kind of data visitors really want to type in the address bar of FireFox, Opera or Internet Explorer.

You have to pay for this name because there is a company (or actually a group of services companies) providing the infrastructure behind the translation between www.lexyk.com and the ugly dotted numeric address. This translation is known as a DNS (Domain Name Service).

In my case, I used Gandi, a French registrar (that’s the ugly name of such companies that provide registration services for domain names!) that I appreciate because they are reasonably priced (14€ VAT-included, per year) and support a large variety of basic and not so basic services. Nevertheless, I did need the bare minimum: a name, and DNS basic service.

Once you have paid for this name and the support for the transparent translation to a numeric address, you are ready to go to the next step (renting publishing space).

Today, I took a few hours to test my new tele-lens Minolta 300mm f/4. Those few images were taken in the Park of the Castle of Grouchy in the middle of the day while I was looking for little birds (I never caught): Finally, here are some very static images from the underbrush.

Latest news from the web site inside mechanism: I just upgraded to the latest revision of WordPress (v2.0.4). A more stable, less bugged, more secure version. I thought you’d like to know that I keep security upgrades in mind to protect both the site and its contents (including your personal data).

I am quite proud of buying it: To add to my own little collection of photo equipment, I just bought a superb second-hand Minolta APO G High-Speed 300mm f/4 which will be mostly used on my Konica-Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 7D (but presented here on my old Minolta Dynax 9xi).

Quite heavy (I don’t know how people do if they buy the twice bigger 300mm f/2.8 from the same brand), quite nice glass (apparently insensitive to flare), quite well built. Some images will come later.

Sci-Fi usually includes a lot of science. It has sometimes been said that it is mostly bad science, but it is science anyway. The serious scientists of the Sci-Fi Science web site give us a lot of details about what we will find or what we should notice in famous SciFi novels and movies.

Examples:

• Serious stuff: CLICK HERE - for a description of teleporters as seen on Star Trek (beam me up Scotty) and Stargate SG-1 (the rings and the Asguard beaming device)
• Fun stuff: CLICK HERE - for fun games and gadgets (including some impressive big boys’ toys)

It did not take long: The electronic passport, that several countries actively defend (particularly the United States of America that tell us it will be the ultimate weapon against terrorists and frauders) and are preparing for full distribution, met a string of very significant problems last week in the Black Hat convention of Las Vegas.

First, a GErman hacker, Lukas Grunwald, proved that it is possible to reproduce the individual electronic code of the passeport (this the end of the proven unfalsifiable identification). He only needed the public documentation of ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation), a freely available ePassport reader with its freely available software. Then, in a matter of minutes, he merely did a copy of an existing passport (more precisely of the electronic part of the passport: the RFID chip integrated into the passport and that is intended to be read from some distance). The simple copy of the electronic contents of the passport should allow to easily forge a full passport (let’s think of an air ppirate needing a forgery good enough to allow him to pass unrecognized at the check-in controls of a busy international airport). The worst is that all the information is coming from public documentation and the hardware can be bought readily.

Furthermore, we should remember that the electronic data is easily accessible from a distance (reading/data-exchange without contact) thanks to the properties of the RFID chip. Authorities tell us that the bearer of the passport will choose when his/her passport will read.

But, here comes the second problem or the second failure. How does the bearer protect herself against illegal or fraudulent access to her passport data? Remember that just passing in front of a small inconspicuous machine reader is enough to let it being read. Nobody will ask you to draw it from your pocket. So, the second issue (and the most worrysome) becomes that somebody could easily steal your passport data and you wouldn’t know. Or, even worse, a terrorist may decide to build a bomb that could explode if it detects a specific passport. We are not far from the bomb targetting American passports. Wouldn’t it be interesting fro certain types of terrorists?

Sure! You can roll your passport in an aluminium foil (do you remember the “tinfoil hat” of our young years?) but can you see yourself unrolling tinfoil anytime you go through the airport security (and remembering to do the oppiste just afterwards)? Just to protect yourself against fraudulent usage. We are told that passports could come with an integrated tinfoil cover. Then, where is the distance reading of the passport? Where is the advantage compared to the simpler, easier optical reading?

Deployement is already started in some countries. I wouldn’t bet that this is reliably, reassuringly simple technolgoy. Would you?

Sources:

• Wired
• The Register (UK)

Really! In 2005, you had been 80,000 visitors. But I just had a look at my statistics and it seems that in the last year (from August 2005 to July 2006), you were more than 200,000 to jump into my web site. Is it that the Internet is getting larger (more users mean more visitors here)? Or is it that Roumazeilles.net is more interesting?

You can tell me in the comments below.

A scientific study recently suggested that these animals that were present in West Africa no longer exist in the wild and the species went extinct in this part of the world. Actually, the expected last animals failed to be found in Northern Cameroon.

Consequently, the West African black rhino sub-species has been tentatively declared extinct.

In Africa, another black rhino and four white rhino sub-species (all grey, by the way) are also on the brink of extinction due to continuous poaching and competition between rhinoceros and man for their natural habitat.

Source: Reuters.

More information about the rhinoceros: Wikipedia.

These days, my PC is suffering some monitor-ache. My faithful-up-to-now Sony Multiscan E400 monitor (a very nice 19″ CRT) sometimes falls down into a kind of “fuzzy display mode”. I fear that a complete failure may happen in the coming days or weeks and I started asking the question of what LCD monitor I would be ready to buy to replace it, remembering that my basic needs are:

• A nice and faithful color rendering (in order to keep the graphical/color chain sufficently managed to do photographic work)
• Fast reaction times in order to play easily with my prefered FPS (video games that require both a relatively high resolution and excellent switching times to follow fast movements)

(more…)

This monstrous library choke full of information for the developer of Windows applications and (preferably, but not only) using Microsoft development tools was - up to now - only available in a paying subscription. This was a strong limitation for those developers not serious enough to invest in such a tool.

Microsoft decided to change its policy about distributing the MSDN Library. Everything is now free and downloadable (about 1.6GB anyway).