This is so cool! That explains why there are all those silly yellow “20”’s in the background of the new US 20 dollar bills. The political/social/freedom aspects of this story leave me totally irritated. But the technology involved is pretty nifty, and the fact that the authorities managed to get this integrated into software for image editing, photocopiers, etc without any public scrutiny is just absolutely unbelievable. So now the countdown starts. How many days until a hacker writes a tool to fix this brain damage in Photoshop? All that is required is a program that takes a bitmap with EURion constellations in it as input and creates as output a bitmap missing the minimal amount of data so as to not trigger the EURion detection algorithm. ...

Jhango is throwing a party Friday night to Saturday morning to celebrate when Unix time rolls over from 230-1 to 230. Since I can’t be there in person, I made her a binary clock that runs under Win32. It was surprisingly easy. I had it working in under 2 hours. I’ve made a few Windows apps before, but nothing like this. Yay for good documentation and an IDE that literally forces you to do it their way. (But I’m still glad my day job is not making Win32 apps.) ...

I just got home from a long visit with kc in San Diego. I took Highway 101 down and most of the way back. It is so much nicer than I-5. Today, on the way back, I strayed from 101 and took some back roads. I ended up coming up state route 25 from south of Pinnacles National Monument. There are some absolutely stunning vistas down there. Was nice to trade some time for some driving on twisty roads with no traffic and no sprawling wasteland on the side of the road. ...

This article in the Chronicle, describing confused visitors to the city of San Fransisco during a power outage, is just over the top. Its treatment of the suburbanites who subsidize San Francisco’s excesses is offensive, and I hope they get called on it. You know, we don’t need to come to Union Square to shop. We have malls in San Mateo and Santa Clara county too. Perhaps we only go to the City because we have some deep seated desire to be insulted by the city dwellers, to be reminded of how inferior our suburban lives are. Or maybe we come offering a few dollars of tax revenue that your city can use to get the bums off your streets, so that we can bring our relatives to your city next summer without being ashamed by it. ...

This article details a successful attempt by a Chinese man to get real-world repayment for stolen virtual goods. What effect will it have on the economies of the world when the economies of virtual worlds are harmonized and integrated into the real economies? One of the central ideas of the Western, market based economy is that infinite growth (or at least, growth for the forseeable future) is possible. I’ve always considered that idea suspicious. Perhaps these virtual spaces will give the real economy more room to grow. At least the virtual economies do not yet seem to have the same old externalities (pollution, class divides, mono-culture, etc). What externalities do these economies have that we just haven’t noticed yet? ...

Interesting new report from CAIDA on the DOS attacks against SCO.

Karl’s been doing the crossword online at Yahoo for a while now. I worked one at lunch the other day with him, and found it really enjoyable. This was a really easy one, suitable for a newbie like me. When I was a kid I used to watch my grandparents working together on the crossword. I liked watching them do them, but I couldn’t get any clues, so I disliked the crossword itself. ...

On the first day it was released, I installed iTunes for Windows. I figured something from Apple has a chance of dislodging WinAmp as my music player. They pay attention to important details, and except for the ongoing Quicktime debacle, make software most people seem to like. Using it to edit MP3 metadata has been a disappointment. Though other people claim it makes perfect sense to them, I can’t for the life of me understand how to make a playlist. Part of the problem is that I keep right clicking on stuff, and nothing useful happens. ...

On a whim, I typed a few naughty words into Mozilla’s URL bar, just to see what would happen. I typed “ass”, and I got sent to the DNC blog. WTF?

Tonight I had a little get together for my closest friends for cocktails, cards, birthday cake, and good conversation. I don’t normally like card games too much, but under the right circumstances, they are a blast. The circumstances tonight was studying up for next weekend when I might need to know the details of some card games. As usual, of course, the studying will prove completely useless. So, not a blast, but worthwhile anyway. ...