Journal
Thoughts on photography, technology, music, and creative work.
You can check out the rest of the set here. Previously someone had emailed and asked me how I create these images, they are just 3 shots put together using Photomatix. You can read a great tutorial on Photomatix here.
You can check out the rest of the short series I shot today here. I am processing the HDR versions and will post them soon.
For the second time in as many months I have sent off my favorite lens (which is possibly going to lose that distinction thanks to my 24-70 f/2.8 L that I just picked up) to the Canon Factory Service Center. My first experience with Canon Factory Service was actually a really good one, as they hastily repaired my shutter mechanism and had the camera back to me within a few weeks.
A few months later I decided to send them my Speedlite 580EX which had a faulty motor in the zoom mechanism which allows the flash to automatically change the size of the flash that is thrown to suit your current lens, zoom level and sensor size. At the same time I sent them my 85 1.2, which was, and still is, having problems focusing.
When I focus on an object that is 10 feet away, I get the focus confirmation light, but then the resulting image is focused a few feet past where it should have been. With nearly any other lens, this would not be a problem at all, but thanks to the razor think depth of field at f/1.2, this problem makes my lens nearly useless at the aperture that it is designed for.
After holding my lens for nearly 2 months, Canon Factor Service returned it to me, with no changes whatsoever, saying that it was restored to factory quality. I am hoping for Canon that the problem was with their tech, and that factory quality does not mean that the focus is off by nearly 20%. I am eagerly awaiting the functional return of one of my favorite lenses.
Eric Richardson and I have been trying for over a year to get in to the Triforium Control Center in the Los Angeles ~~Underground~~ Mall. Today Eric got us a tour thanks to help from Councilmember Jan Perry and Greg Fischer, who were both instrumental in the re-lighting of the divisive public work of art originally lit 1975.
Even now the Triforium has been drawing praise and scorn, most recently from the City Attorney's office which has been claiming that the music is disturbing them and has requested it only play from 11am to 1pm, which completely defeats the purpose of having the lights on, as you can hardly see them during the day. Although many art critics despise the sculpture I find it strangely charming and the primitive computer control system intrigues me.
When we looked through the control center today we found an old Teletype machine that was used to read and write punch tape which held the program the Triforium's computer used to synchronize with music. Our goal is to take those tapes, capture them and use them as a basis for the new computer control, which will most likely be a BASIC stamp or a PIC microcontroller. Once that works the next step, would ideally be to have some type of web interface to the system.
I brought my portable studio lighting setup along for the tour and took some photos, of which here is a sampling:
You can flip through the whole Triforium Control Center gallery here.
Well, I've been too busy to blog recently due to several large projects that I'm working on concurrently, but I figured I would respond to this 5 things meme, as Siel of Green LA Girl tagged me.
The unique throwaway email address that I used only for NetIQ was eventually sold to a spam list. Shame on you NetIQ, I don't think you've adhered to your own privacy policy.
... we want you to know that NetIQ is not in the business of selling or renting individuals' personal data to other companies for marketing purposes.
Looks like Orochon finally posted a scan of my polaroid on their website:
Just seeing this picture makes me hungry for some ~~painful burning~~ ramen. I wrote about my experience at Orochon earlier this year.
Last weekend, the wife and I drove up to Angel's Gate and did a portrait session with the beautiful setting sun as our backdrop. I used two strobes, at roughly 45 degrees and 10 feet back from Penelope. The strobes were bounced off of white umbrellas raised up about 8 or 9 feet. The light ratio was 1:4 between key and fill. I triggered the flashes with my trusty set of PocketWizard Plus IIs and metered with my Sekonic L-558R. Shot with a Canon EOS 30D and an EF 85mm f/1.2 L. My wife is a beautiful and patient model.
The key flash was still recycling in the second shot, but I still love it.
After growing up in the Bay Area, I attended High School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One day my father, who worked as a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, brought me to, and later got me a job at, a nerd's paradise called The Black Hole. I ended up working there for 3 summers and I think it was probably my favorite job ever, although it only paid $5 an hour. Many of the hours I worked were directly exchanged for random bits of junk, much of which I still have, to my wife's elation, stored away in boxes in our storage closet.
When I saw heathervescent's post about the upcoming Dorkbot Socal trip to APEX Electronics, I knew I had to go. The night before the trip I shot an email out to an especially geeky list that I run and CHS responded that he wanted to come along. We arrived a bit late at Machine Project, and Tom Jennings was mostly finished talking about what to expect. I mentioned my previous employment at The Black Hole and he told me that he make a road trip there every year, saying that it was one of his favorite places in the world.
After a short drive to the highly industrial Sun Valley, we made our way in to the wonderfully techno-detritus rich warehouse known as APEX Electronics. I immediately pulled out my camera, set up my tripod and began photographing the narrow aisles packed high with everything from oscilloscopes to capacitors to vacuum tubes.
APEX reminded me of a 1/10th scale model of The Black Hole, with less nuclear research equipment and more audio recording, broadcast and aviation gear. The organization of APEX is at least an order of magnitude better than The Black Hole, but I guess that having one tenth the amount of junk makes that possible. I should be careful about calling the contents of APEX or TBS junk, as they say, "one man's trash...", and also the collectors of said equipment seem to develop an emotional attachment to their toys.
Most of the aisles held boxes full of components, with a single version taped to the front of the box. Some of the more valuable gear like the microwave wave guides, windows and transmitters were locked up behind glass, which the owner, Don, was nice enough to open for me so I could take a photo. Tom mentioned that one aisle had collapsed in an earthquake almost 2 decades ago, and had yet to be cleaned up.
Outside there were towering piles of scrap aluminum, kegs, airplane wings, cable, and junk. I especially enjoyed the pile of "Safety First" signs that were haphazardly piled together along with what appeared to be a bomb, but was probably an airplane fuel tank.
It is a good thing that I am short on physical space in my loft, otherwise I surely would have purchased more than the $1 clamp that I picked up. If you are building a robot or some other fun project, this would be a great place to pick up those hard to find parts you need. If you are a junk collector, but you don't want to blow all your hard earned money in one place, you should avoid this place at all costs.
Full gallery here.
Update Heathervescent's flickr photo set can be found here, Zoetica's can be found here (Thanks thedaniel).
The rest of the album can be found here. Also you can listen to a podcast of the even here.
Update: Xeni posted about the event on BoingBoing and put up some cool videos.
Last week I got a pre-tour of the new setup at the Griffith Observatory. I took some HDR photos of the awesome new Zeiss Universarium IX among other things. You can check out the full album here. I will be writing several pieces about what I saw in the next few days, keep an eye out for them on MetroBlogging Los Angeles. [Note: I didn't have / use my new lighting setup for these shots.]
Update Here is the article I wrote on b.la.
As I mentioned in the last few posts that I just posted in a spurt of posting activity, that I am building up a portable, battery powered lighting setup. I didn't feel like spending $3,000+ on a "real" head / pack lighting system as of yet, although some day I will end up buying one, most likely the Dyna-lite setup at first, but then eventually a Profoto rig. Portability is probably the biggest factor for me, as I don't have a studio to shoot in, so nearly all my work will be done on location. Many of the locations I plan on shooting will be either outdoors, or in places where lack of line voltage would be a limiting factor.
I already possessed a Quantum Turbo 2x2, which I've been very happy with in combination with my Canon Speedlite 580EX. I didn't want to buy another 580, because I didn't plan on using E-TTL for my portrait lighting, so after some research I decided to pick up the very moderately priced Sunkpak 120J Auto Pro, which is a bare bulb flash, that can be powered directly by an HV power pack, without needing any other batteries, unlike the 580EX.
Unfortunately Adorama sent me the TTL version of the 120J, which didn't come with the sync adapter, so I bought the standard shoe adapter that has the sync connector. This really isn't what I wanted as I will never actually be mounting it on a hot or cold flash shoe. I am trying to work it out with Adorama now, I need the flash for some work I have coming up, and they want me to buy the right one, even though it was their mistake in sending me the wrong one, and then send back the wrong unit when the new one comes. I feel like they should take the hit, send me the new one and I'll send them back the wrong when when I have received the correct model. I will see what happens, but I have a feeling that I am going to have to do it their way, which is too bad.
So as I wrote about earlier, I am using the 2 PocketWizard Plus II transceivers to trigger the flashes, which I am bouncing off or through a couple of convertible Photoflex umbrellas, that are sitting atop one Photoflex stand and one Avenger Stand. The third PW is on atop my camera in the hot shoe and I am using the Sekonic L-558R to meter the scenes. I also just picked up a couple of used C-Stands, and although they're heavy as hell, they're very sturdy and will be great to hold my convertible reflector and down the road flags, scrims, fingers, dots, etc. I also bought another Quantum battery, this one a Turbo Z. I have some sand bags and cases for the stands in the mail. In the future I will be buying some Chimera softboxes
My first results have come out quite well, but I still have a long way to go, and I am planning on taking some lighting classes, and maybe attending a workshop or two.
Now that I'm building up my studio / location lighting kit, I can no longer rely on my trusty Canon 580EX's built in E-TTL system to do the dirty work of exposure calculation for me on the fly. E-TTL is great, don't get me wrong, but it only works when the flash is either on camera, off camera with the off camera flash cord or triggered with Canon's IR remote, which only works if your flash is facing you and you were within a fairly distance from your flash and within a fairly narrow angle. I logically decided that I needed a flash meter.
There are plenty of flash meters out there, from the trusty analog flash meter to high end digital meters with built in radio slave transmitters. I thought of it, like many folks think of tripods, that you can start out with the cheapest you can get, but in the long run you'll most likely end up spending more on upgrades until you get to where you want to be, than if you just shell out the money for the good stuff up front. So I decided on the latter, and shelled out the roughly half grand on the Sekonic L-558R.
The Sekonic L-558R is an easy to use (once you've read the manual) and sturdy flash meter, that also functions as an incident and reflected spot meter. The meter will read your flash in both incident and reflective modes, I think it is pretty cool that you can take a spot meter flash reading, but I'm sure there are other units that can do the same thing. As I mentioned before, the meter has a PocketWizard module that is built into the L-558R which allows you to trigger your flashes directly from the meter without using a sync cord.
One of the features that I find most useful is the ability to meter you key light, and then meter your fill light, and the meter will give you the difference between the two in EVs. This is an easy way to figure out the ration between your key and fill. You can also fire a series of flashes, storing each one in memory, and then get either a cumulative or average reading.
The meter itself is very compact, fits nicely in your hand and feels solid and well built. I would prefer the device didn't require the expensive 3V lithium battery that could be tough to procure in a bind, but I guess they decided they could make it a tiny bit more compact if they used the 3V lithium as opposed to using 2 AAs or AAAs. The only other issue I have with the meter isn't actually related to the meter, but to an older spot meter that I've been borrowing from my mother to use with my Mamiya RB67 setup, which was "modified" by Zone VI to have a nice little movable zone scale on the side, which makes ensuring that my exposure contains the data I want much easier. I know that I can just take an EV reading and put that into either my mental Zone chart, or I can put it on my handy Zone worksheet, but the little paper ring on the manual scale was really nice.
Before I bought the L-558R I found out that Sekonic is coming out with a new meter, specifically tailored to digital cameras, called the L-758DR. The 758DR allows you to load 4 custom profiles into the meter via a USB cable so that the meter will "respond to light exactly like your digital camera or type of film." Another very cool and helpful feature is the ability of the meter to warn you if you are outside the dynamic range of your medium. The 758DR is also extremely sensitive, down to f-2.0! I may or may not upgrade when it comes out. The 558 has all the features I really need and many more.
After researching the ideal flash slave system for months I settled on the PocketWizard system. In reality, there wasn't much of a question in my head as to which system I was going to buy, this may seem a bit silly, but they had me at the ads. Their full page ads run every month in Shutterbug and many other photo mags, and their system is built in to several competing brands of lights including Profoot, Dyna-lite, Speedotron and Norman. There is fairly solid consensus in the professional photo industry that the PW system is the best you can get. The only other serious player for radio slaves is Quantum, but they just aren't as slick.
I just picked up a set of 2 Pocketwizard Plus II transceivers from Adorama and a third unit from Samy's Camera and they are nothing short of wonderful. Not only are they absolutely simple to operate, they just plain work. After about 500 shots fired, I've never had a single misfire. They are light-weight, compact, and as far as I can tell, very sturdy. They have a range of roughly 1500' and they will receive and rebroadcast signals so that range is really only limited by the amount of units you own. I recommend these units without reservation.
I have recently begun putting together my portable studio lighting setup. I need portability and the ability to shoot in the field off the grid. I will expand more about this in a later post, but I am writing this to address the poor quality of Photoflex hardware. I ordered a Photoflex umbrella kit that included a reversible umbrella, stand and shoe mount flash clamp from Adorama. So far the umbrella and the stand have worked out, although were made in China and feel cheap as far as their fit and finish.
After the first kit arrived I made my way over to Samy's Camera on Fairfax and bought another umbrella and clamp, plus a stand, but not a Photoflex, I decided against buying another one of their stands and picked up a high quality Manfrotto Avenger Mini-Max. When I got home I set up everything and took a few shots and everything worked just fine. The next day I set it all back up and lo and behold I noticed that the screw that holds the umbrella into the clamp had stripped and would no longer hold the umbrella. The Photoflex umbrella clamp has metal threads for every screw except the one that hold the umbrella, which feeds directly into threaded plastic. It is not surprising that this stripped. I have vowed to never buy another piece of Photoflex equipment. I really shouldn't have bought any in the first place.
I took the clamp back to Samy's and although I didn't have the box or the receipt, the salesman looked me up in the system and gave me full credit for the item, after chiding me for throwing away my boxes. I normally never throw away boxes for anything that costs over $50, but I guess I should at least hold on to the boxes for the cheap stuff for a week or two. I used my credit towards a nice, high quality Manfrotto clamp, which is made out of aluminum, brass and steel. It looks and feels like a quality piece of equipment, and it is made in Italy.
Last night after the Detour show, my friend Mike Rocchio and I went to Oomasa for sushi. I ate sweet shrimp, with the shrimp heads in soup form. Afterwards I felt a little tickle in my throat, but I was still fairly buzzed and it didn't really bother me until I was about to go to sleep. I had what I thought was a little bit of shrimp antenna lodged in my throat. I tried to wash it down with some cereal and copious amounts of water, but it stayed stuck in there. I went to bed hoping it would work its self loose by morning, but when I awoke it was still there.
I decided to call Kaiser and see what they recommended, but while I was on hold I decided to look in the mirror and see if I could see anything. Lo and behold, there it was, a big honkin' shrimp leg lodged in the back of my throat. Penelope, my wonderful wife / nurse in training offered to extract it with a pair of tweezers. After a few tries she skillfully snatched it and removed it. I took a few photos with a nickel for scale here.
Mack Reed over at LAVoice wrote this excellent piece about the efforts the LAPD are putting in to get the dealers off the street in Skid Row. It is the best article I've read about the problems going on there right now and the LAPD's response that I have read so far.
Tomorrow night is the Gallery Row Organization's Fundraiser at the Oviatt. Read more about it here.
My LAist interview is up, go check it out.
I've been leading the Downtown Art Ride for almost a year now and in the last 6 months or so I've brought my 20D, and now my 30D, with me on every ride. I have been trying to get a portrait of every artist that I've run in to. On this last ride I think I photographed over 20 artists, you can check out the September Art Ride photos here.
I've been busy and haven't had much to say here on eecue.com, but I've posted over on blogging.la about my private tour of the Banksy exhibition.
Penelope and I are very lucky to have two wonderful cats to share our loft with. Evita and Isabella were nice enough to pose for me yesterday after I unpacked my new camera, a Canon EOS 30D. Setup used for the following shots:
As I mentioned earlier, my 20D's shutter is kaput after about 50,000 exposures over that last 2 years. Today I made my way down to Samy's Camera on Fairfax and picked up a Canon EOS 30D. One of the cool things about Samy's is that, although their website always has lower prices than they advertise in their store, they will always match their website pricing, plus shipping. The 30D ended up costing me $1216.97 plus tax, which is more than I would have paid if I had ordered it from B&H or Adorama, but I would have had to wait a week before it came, and I need it for a shoot I am doing on Friday. Another cool thing about Samy's, and any retail store front for that matter, is that they are willing to work with you on pricing and I got a good deal on a Stratos flash bracket, a Hoodman 2GB 150x CF card, a Stofen Omni Bounce, and an Off Camera Flash Cable.
One of the first things I noticed about the 30D is that the shutter mechanism, which is rated to 100,000 exposures, is much quieter than the one in my 20D. I am not sure if this is because my 20D's shutter mechanism was on its last legs and was starting to die, but it was at least twice as loud as the one in my 30D. Of course the 30D also has spot metering (finally!!!) as well as nice big 2.5" LCD. I am a little bummed that the body shape changed as my Really Right Stuff L Bracket will no longer fit, but that's ok, I really should have one on both of my rigs. I am already very happy with the test shots I took using the flash bracket, having it off camera really makes a big difference.
Last night I got an email from the commander of the Search and Rescue (SAR) team that I am a part of, about a mutual-aid callout on San Jacinto for a missing hiker. I got the call at about 2230 and quickly responded that I would be there. I got about 4 hours of sleep as I had to wake up at 0330 in order to be at the Sheriff's Office at 0500 to pick up one of the Sheriff's vehicles and drive to the base of the tram by 0600 hours. I am not normally one to be on time, but when it comes to searches it is important to be punctual as someone's life is on the line.
At the briefing my teammate Mark Kinsey and I got our mission which entailed us riding up to the San Jacinto peak on Los Angeles Sheriff's Department's gargantuan Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King known as Air Rescue 5 then riding the hoist down to the summit and then hiking cross country through the west side of San Jacinto and eventually coming to a trail that would take us to the tram. I was excited about riding in a helicopter, as the last time I had the pleasure of rotor based travel I was in Search and Rescue in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Zipping down from a hovering helicopter on a piece of aircraft cable attached to my seat harness whilst carrying my 24 hour pack was quite a rush. Once I was on the peak and I unclipped from the hoist I snapped a few photos of the bird and Mark and I made our way across the ridge.
The mission was supposed to be technical so we kept our harnesses on, but we never ended up needing them apart from the helicopter bit. It was really just bouldering for the first mile or so until we turned down towards the saddle between two peaks, at which point we had to walk on top of dense brush for about another 1/2 mile dropping several hundred vertical feet. After the brush it was fairly easy going for the next couple of miles until we hit more dense brush and it started raining. Despite the rain and the brush we made good time and soon enough we were on a real trail. We double-timed it back to the tram and made our way down to the command post for debriefing at around 1530.
We didn't find any tracks or signs of the missing subject, but hopefully other teams will find him tomorrow. [You can find the rest of the photos here]
Update They found him and he is ok!
Yesterday Penelope and I made a trip down to the San Diego Zoo and about half way through our adventures my camera started taking photos on its own in rapid succession while flashing Error 99 on the LCD. I tried pulling the batteries and letting it sit for a while, but that didn't cut it. I looked through my photo archive and I've taken well over 50,000 photos with it since I bought it in February 2005. Looks like I will be without a digital SLR (still have a film SLR body) for a couple of weeks while I get it repaired.
Update After finding someone who had the exact same problem that I did and emailing said person, I found out that I needed to replace my shutter. Canon will do it for $196 which also includes a complete overhaul and cleaning of the camera. It takes 7-10 business days to complete. I am sending it off today.
After our most excellent 17 mile bike ride through the fake downtown of Huntington Park which Mack Reed describes so wonderfully, Sean Bonner mentioned that there was a new Borat Trailer before Snakes on a Plane. I found it here on Yahoo, it's nice... I like.
My photography has been published before in a local music rag called Jointz Magazine. I was excited to find out that one of my protest photos (shown below) will be published in a report about American population growth and land use trends for a New York based not-for-profit organization called the Regional Plan Association. I will post a copy of the report once it prints.
Where are you man? We were good/best friends in High School. I can't seem to find you on the web except for this photo of you from 1996. If you stumble across this let me know!
I really didn't mean to wait this long before posting photos from our honeymoon, but I've been busy. I separated them into the following sections:* Nadi, Fiji * Jean-Michel Cousteau, Fiji : Arrival * Waterfall Hike, Cousteau, Fiji * Jean-Michel Cousteau Resort, Fiji * Town of Savusavu,Fiji * Private Island, Cousteau, Fiji * Fiji Village * Fiji Sunset HDR * Garden of the Sleeping Giant, Nadi, Fiji * Lautoka, Fiji
Joanna Rutkowska gave a highly informative talk at Black Hat called "Subverting Vista Kernel For Fun And Profit." In the first part of her talk, she demonstrated an attack on Vista's code signing feature that requires any code that is loaded into the kernel to be signed by Microsoft. Her attack did not take advantage of an implementation bug or a vulnerability, but instead used the built in raw disk write access to change a few lines in the pagefile. Once the pagefile was altered and the changed data was read back into memory she was able to load any code she desired into the kernel. She stated that this didn't mean that Vista was insecure, just not as secure as Microsoft says.
I talked to her for a few minutes today about her talk and asked if she was going to be releasing the code, and she said she didn't see the point of doing that. Her goal was not to provide people with a way to hack systems, but to alert the community and Microsoft of a flaw in the system. She also mentioned that she is in active informal discussions with Microsoft and they are aware of the problem and the potential solutions she laid out in her talk, but she didn't want to comment on what they were going to do about it.
The second part of her talk covered a proof of concept root kit called Blue Pill that takes advantage of the extremely powerful new virtualization features in the new 64 bit AMD processors. Blue Pill takes a running operating system and completely virtualizes it beneath a Hypervisor which can then be used to intercept certain system calls and execute arbitrary code nearly completely invisible to the user. As the system is truly virtualized on the processor level and not in kernel and userspace, the virtualized system has direct access to the hardware (except for calls the hypervisor is intercepting) and detection would be non-trivial to say the least. Although she did her research on the AMD processor, she said the same attacks would be possible on the new Intel chips, although their virtualization implementation was not as powerful.
"Faster Pwning Assured: Hardware Hacks and Cracks with FPGAs" with David Hulton & Dan Moniz. I didn't stay for this talk, as I'd seen Hikari's original talk at LayerOne a couple years back, but I did get a couple shots of him and the expanded setup of FPGAs.
Brendan O'Connor gave a talk called "Vulnerabilities in Not-So Embedded Systems" about how easy it is to take over the computers that run the Xerox Multifunction Devices. Basically he wants people to treat these supposed embedded systems as servers which they really are. Through his research he found that the Xerox systems didn't have the GRUB boot loader locked down with a password so he was able to gain access to the system and basically do whatever he wanted with it. These systems are dangerous because they are full linux systems, but the user doesn't have access to it so they are unable to secure it. As you know services are constantly being found to be vulnerable and relying on a technician to come and patch your copier isn't going to keep your network safe. It would be wise for vendors to allow users access to these systems so that they can keep them safe.
Alex Stamos and Zane Lackey gave a talk at Black Hat called "Breaking AJAX Web Applications: Vulns 2.0 in Web 2.0". As AJAX evolves from a toy used by teenyboppers to a serious tool used by banks, hospitals and uncle same, it becomes more and more important to ensure bug free code. AJAX has changed web attacks by exposing the use of frameworks used by the applications via included .js files which expose supported calls. Cross site scripting becomes more complicated as you can inject script into the javascript stream. Injection attacks are also more dangerous due to front ends that are exposed in the client side code. Business logic in applications has become more complex so parameter manipulation vulnerabilities are still excellent attacks.
XSS becomes more complicated and more interesting because you can just put javascript right into a running javascript engine, which becomes harder to escape as you're no longer looking for brackets and tags.
Because your browser is running a javascript application, if an attacker sends you rogue code, in say link form in your cool AJAX email app, your browser will run the code sent in the webmail application instead of loading it in a new page and then the attacker would be sent your authentication cookie. The attacker would then have access to your web mail. The speakers used the fictitious company Webmail.com in this example, and when asked about gmail they responded that they have more lawyers than webmail.com, but it was pretty clear the attack they were talking about was possibly on gmail.
Dynamic script nodes allow attackers to embed malicious javascript in a website that would allow a cookie from any site to be pulled because browsers allow cross domain XmlHttpRequests, this is very bad!
The big vendors are more willing to talk to the researchers and the end users are more apt to work with the vendors. Most vendors are very cooperative about security issues and disclosure. The Cicso incident has made big vendors more willing to work with end users and security researchers, and all in all the incident was good for the security industry. Large customers of big vendors want earlier disclosure information to be shared with them before the smaller customers, but the consensus is that early disclosure for big customers is a bad idea, even to the point of not giving preferred treatment even to internal networks and devices. A very large part of the discussion involved when vendors have a vulnerability and not a fix. There was no clear consensus on this topic, but the vendors felt they shouldn't disclose a vulnerability unless they have a fix for it except in extreme circumstances. Vendors don't want to draw attention to a flaw that people don't know about, so they aren't likely to disclose. One of the best things is that vendors are talking more, talking to researchers and working together to fix problems.
I missed Claudio Merloni and Luca Carettoni's talk about their cool suitcase based bluetooth hacking system named BlueBag, because I was fighting an epic battle with a cruel hangover this morning. I did get a chance to talk to them and photograph the bag up close in the press room. The system inside is a low powered Micro-ATX motherboard running Gentoo Linux and the custom software that does the actual hacking will be available soon on their website. The system can detect and attack bluetooth devices from distances of over several hundred feet thanks to the built in amplifiers and the attacker can access the BlueBag system via a laptop remotely. The BlueBag has a side effect of knocking out 802.11b within about 10 meters due to the bluetooth amps. They chose not to fly with the BlueBag and instead shipped it in to Vegas, which was probably a good idea due to the extremely suspicious contents of the case. More photos of the BlueBag here.
People love free booze and tickets to parties at which free booze is provided are a hot commodity at security conventions. A company called Tipping Point that is a subsidiary of 3Com is throwing a party tonight at Body English in the Hard Rock. To get an invite you would have had to RSVP with their PR people before the convention, which of course I didn't, or you would have to wait in "line" and get a ticket on a first come first served basis. I put line in quotes because the folks manning the booth didn't seem to have any idea about how to do an orderly giveaway. They told everyone to stand there and wait their turn, but never actually instructed people to get into a single file line. The "line" was actually more like a mob and when they started giving away the tickets it turned into a writhing blob of stinky geeks, I almost lost my camera bag in the chaos. In the end I got my pass to the party and I will go and take part in the booze drinking. I don't want to make a presumption about the quality of their product based on the lack of organization of their giveaway, but it is hard not to.
Update Last night we defeated the authentication system of the Tipping Point party and got about 12 people in with just the 1 token I won, plus 2 or 3 tokens that we temporarily borrowed from random people. The flaw in the system was pretty simple, the bouncers didn't take your token away when you got in so if you went outside to make a phone call or whatnot you could give your token or several you borrowed to your friends. The part was fun and being 23b, we danced.
Frequently you find a speaker who is covering a very interesting topic, but may not quite have a firm grasp on keeping a crowd interested. Public speaking is not a skill that I have mastered, and I feel that the folks that were talking about Sidewinder are in the same boat. Sidewinder is a promising piece of software that Shawn Embleton, Sherri Sparks and Ryan Cunningham are working on. Sidewinder is a fuzzer that uses genetic algorithms to evolve the fuzzed input in order to get the funky data to the place in the code where you want it. The next logical step of their application is to add some software to create exploits once you get to the place in the code where you suspect a vulnerability may exist. Keep an eye on these three, I see big things coming from their collective intelligence in the next few years.
Update I had a chance to speak with Shawn about the Sidewinder application and he told me it was all coded in just a few months. He isn't sure if he will have time to continue development on the application, but I encouraged him to as I feel it is a great concept and could grow to be one of the best fuzzers out there.
The guys from a wireless research company called Flexilis who happen to be based a block and a half from my loft, just showed me their proof of concept demo of a serious flaw in the upcoming RFID embedded Passports, scheduled to be released in October. The RFID passports incorporate a shielding mechanism to prevent rogue readers from picking up the sensitive information contained in your US passport, but as it turns out if the passport is slightly open it can be read. This may not seem like much of a big deal until you watch the following video where they created a proof of concept Improvised Explosive Device that detects the presence of a US passport and detonates a charge (or in their test case, some model rocket engines).
This hack could also be used to identify to unique individual and then detonate a device or track them. Because the RFID technology works at only close distances this attack is especially dangerous. I talked to them about the possibilities of attacking the RFID chip even if the passport is closed and it is possibly that with a very strong electromagnetic field, the data could be read on a subcarrier, but they still have more research to do in that area. Here is their abstract about the demo:
The FLX[2006‐0605] video security brief demonstrates a real‐world vulnerability associated with the failure of the shielding component in the current proposed electronic passport design. When partially open, as could be the case when in a pocket, purse, or briefcase, the currently proposed passport can be detected by a nearby inquiring RFID reader. The security brief also demonstrates an improved shield design that requires a passport to be significantly open before reading is possible.
You can read the full RFID Passport Technical Analysis (84K PDF) or the RFID Passport Shield Failure Demonstration (120 KB). The good news is they have proposed a fix for the problem, John Hering told me he had discovered the vulnerability 2 years ago, but didn't want to release knowledge of the problem until he had a fix to go with it.
UPDATE Well it looks like the Department of State decided not to wait until October to begin issuing these dangerous passports. Here is their press release.
I just caught the opening intro from Jeff Moss aka Dark Tangent. He dispelled rumors that Microsoft had attempted to buy a track at the convention, explaining that he was hoping to have some of the Vista engineers at the con to talk about their work that would hopefully coincide with the imminent release of the new OS. As it turned out the Vista release date has been pushed back, so that didn't work out as planned.
The opening keynote was given by Dan Larkin, FBIU Unit Chief of Cyber Initiative & Resource Fusion Unit Cirf-U, a spinoff of IC3. He started out with some bad jokes about how far computers have come which elicited a sum total of zero laughs from the audience. His talk became more interesting when he talked about strides the feds had made in past years working with academia, industry and experts in the field. The FBI is actively investigating all types of cybercrime ranging from phishing to spamming to bank fraud and are uncovering vast organized crime organizations that span the globe.
I had a chance to talk to Dan Larkin more after his talk and I asked him about what percentage of the crime the investigate involves music, movie and software piracy and he said that the organized criminals involved really have their hands in anything and everything illegal that can make them money. He said 30% of the bad guys crime involves When it comes to music, software and music.
I am torn between three of the next talks scheduled, of which I will try and catch a few minutes of each: Bypassing NAC by Ofir Arkin, Black Ops 2006 by Dan Kaminsky and Trusted Computing Revolution by Bruce Potter. Dan's talks are always great and I've enjoyed Ofir's in the past as well. I am pulling the shots from the keynote off my CF card right now and will upload them as soon as they are done.
I am attending a 2 day security convention in Las Vegas called Black Hat. The flight in from LAX was short, although I did get the old TSA hassle, for the first time ever I was directed to stand in the little search corral and the frisked me, then swapped my bags and fed that to the spectrometer, I heard from another attendee that people all over the country are getting extra hassles.
I showed up at Caesar's Palace right at 8am to get my credentials and everything went smoothly. The line for the general credentials was insanely long, but luckily there was a press line that was only a dozen or so people deep. Jeff Moss will be giving his intro in a few minutes and then the keynote: "Fighting Organized Cyber Crime", which should be interesting. I'll get some photos of the speakers and try and upload them and give an update between talks. The photo above is of the free swag you get upon registration... a pretty good haul.
This Saturday at 12:30pm I will be available for dunking in the DefCon EFF dunk tank. The proceeds go to the EFF so it is for a great cause. You know you want to dunk me!
I forgot to mention it but a month or so ago I won the going postal quiz challenge... it was pretty straight forward and from it I gained access to the attrition.org photo gallery. I haven't used it yet, but someday it may come in useful.
The other night there was some filming going on atop the ex-million dollar hotel, which is currently the Rosslyn. The film crew erected a giant glowing sphere which looked a bit like the moon balloon from AI. I took some shots of it from my loft window and created this HDR from 3 of them.
We had the most wonderful honeymoon ever. We didn't want to come back to America, but hey life is about compromise right? We are currently sorting through our photos and our memories and will be posting a complete trip report in the coming days.
I just want to put up a quick post to say the wedding went wonderfully and we had a great time. I would write more, but I have to pack for the honeymoon in Fiji.
I pay good money for a 6mbit DSL connection. Why can I not stream video from your site in real time? It works great from Apple's quicktime trailer site. What is the deal?
The BBC has a ~~show~~ station called 1Xtra that covers "New Black Music" which includes drum'n'bass / jungle. They are coming out across the pond to check out what is happening in the scene out here in Los Angeles as well as 3 other US cities: NY, Houston and Atlanta.
1Xtra is visiting four corners of the USA to bring you the freshest in new black music, interviews with the biggest stars, and a series of massive live shows!
They are going to be interviewing me about junglescene.com as well as the LA scene in general. They are coming out here the day before my wedding so it will be a bit hectic for me! They are covering some dnb shows that will be taking place when I am in Fiji so I will miss those. They have linked to my site, my flickr photos and junglescene on their mini-site and they are also using a photo of mine on their LA DNB page.
Update Oops, I didn't realize that 1Xtra was a full blown station, not just a show.
My future brother-in-law, Noel Proffitt, took me on a photo safari through LA. We went through Vernon, down Pacific Avenue, to Watts and then finally to the beach at Cabrillo Beach. Here are some of the HDR shots I took:
I can't use these in the Hassle Project as I wasn't hassled whilst taking them!
So I saw a post over at digg about how to ruin blogging, and I thought, oh hell yeah count me in! So I signed up on a site called [censored] that allows business to pay bloggers to post about their products. To me this seems a whole lot like payola, but hey I am disclosing that I am advertising for what appears in this post and I am (supposedly going to be paid for it). So let me (or may payola sponsor) ask you some questions
UPDATE: Screw this! Here is what they said:
Please refer to a previous rejection message regarding your posts. Remember: 1)one post PER opportunity 2)word requirements Thank you!
It never said anything about that in the terms of service and this post made the work requirement so I'm over it!
I was not hassled when I took these pictures:
Oh yeah this is going to be great. The Borat trailer is pretty much a rip-off of the U.K. only special called "Best of Borat" although the scene where he kisses his sister was much expanded: "This is my wife, this is my mistress, this is my girlfriend, this is my other girlfriend, this is my sister" Where in each statement his is with a different woman (or young girl in the case of his sister).
UPDATE: So I'm reading through the message board on IMDB and I came across a post [bugmenot registration] from a frat guy who was duped into being in the movie. He wasn't sure if he was in it or not, but then people who have seen the screening chimed in, and oh boy is he in it! Apparently Borat tells them about a game in Khasakstan where they put some cheese up their "khrum" and then let a mouse crawl in, and this guys says he would do it. Too funny... I can't wait for this movie to come out.
I just put up the photos from the May and June Downtown Art Rides. You can check out some selections over at the Downtown Art Ride website or in the galleries on eecue.com: May & June.
[
](http://www.flickr.com/photos/eecue/161845490/ "Photo Sharing")
This weekend I went on one of my weekly urban photo safaris, this time I went through the lovely uninhabited city of Vernon. For those of you who don't know, there are no residences in Vernon at all, just factories, railways and warehouses, which recently has made for some interesting election disputes. I didn't get hasseled anywhere in Vernon by power hungry security guards, but when I first set up the Mamiya to shoot the Amtrak train washing station, I was accosted by a golf cart riding security guard who threatened to take away my equipment because I was trespassing. I understand that if I am trespassing I have to leave, no problem there, although the area wasn't clearly marked as private property, but threatening to take my camera is not cool. It turned out ok because he decided that I wasn't "one of those guys" which I will assume he meant terrorists, but he also added that you could never be too sure. He was nice enough to give me a ride in the golf cart to my car, but I think his motivation there was to get my license plate number. You can check out the rest of my series of HDR shots.
I have changed the design, but you will probably only notice it if you are running Windows Internet Explorer. This page should now render correctly in IE and it no longer has the javascript warning you that you are running an insecure browser. That was just plain annoying, and I apologize for it. I have also moved the blogad away from the right and column and into the left hand column below the google ads. In order to do so, I widened the left column by about 10 pixels. So basically it was a very small change, but once I launch the new version of this site will be a bigger change. I am going to get rid of the whole programmer / designer / admin / human thing as I no longer design, and instead mention something like programmer / photographer / human... or something to that extent.
For the last 6 months or so I've been using my trusty moleskine for taking notes, making checklists and other useful and not so useful tasks such as opening a beer bottle (which doesn't work due to the flexible nature of the moleskine's cover). Yesterday I picked up a new one as mine is almost full and when I got home did a little googling about moleskines. I found this cool site called Moleskinerie and decided to shoot them an email with some photos I had taken of my moleskine. The owner of the site recognized me from my protest photos and then posted what I sent him.
I just bought a complete Mamiya RB67 setup (in pieces) from ebay for my mom's birthday. She used to have the camera about 10 years ago, but sold it when she went digital. I took some photos to test it out this weekend and I am very happy with the result. This is not the final image, but once I get back the higher resolution scan I will replace it.
UPDATE I just got back the 39mb scan of the image from A&I and it looks great. I played with it a bit to bring the detail in the shadows up and also to remove some dust. I am looking forward to printing this. If it looks good @ 10x12 I may get a drum scan done so I can go even bigger.
I love flower macro photography. Desert flowers are my favorite, their tiny buds are so beautiful up close. There is something about a plant that only survives for a few weeks out of the year, yet opens its lovely petals to attract pollen transferring insects in order to sustain its life cycle, that is really amazing. Here is the full gallery of my flower macro photos from this weekend.
When I arrived at this location, I got a call from an old friend, letting me know this is step father had just passed away after a hard fight with cancer. His step father, Scott Brown, was a good friend of mine and I was looking forward to his presence at my wedding, which will now be in spiritual form as opposed to the physical form I was expecting.
After I finished shooting this series, I was approached by a Securitas guardsmen, who informed me that I wasn't allowed to take photos of factoriers, refineries or railroad tracks. He then wrote down my license plate number and asked me for my drivers license which he wrote down the number for. I didn't feel like arguing with him as he was just doing what he was told to do, but it was clearly a violation of my rights. The sky in LA was really beautiful so I wasn't mad and I know that Scott is in a better place now so that took the edge off my sorrow.
I love you, mom! Thanks for the greatest gift ever, life.
My lovely fiance, Penelope is taking part in the Revlon Run/Walk For Women this weekend and she needs your help in the form of sponsorship. She is trying to raise $1,000 for the cause and is walking in honor of my mother, a cancer survivor for 3 years now. Help her out by clicking here and donating. Here is what she is doing in her own words:
I decided last minute to dive into a neighborhood Revlon Walk/Run taking place next Saturday, May 13. Being a runner (although I will be walking this one) and a family member of a cancer survivor, motivated me to participate in this event and raise funds for research, patient/family support, and education of women’s cancers. I consider this my way of collectively raising awareness amongst family/closest friends/co-workers while supporting a notable cause.
Thank you for your support!
Penelope and I love going to the LA Zoo, but don't get to go as often as we would like. We made it out there this weekend on our Sunday together. Here are some of the photos I took:
Photos and [words](http ://blogging.la/archives/2006/04/coachealla_report_day_1.phtml#more).
I have taken some photos of what goes inside an winter alpine SAR pack and posted them on flickr along with notes of what each item is. Click on the following pictures to see the notes:
Inside the bags inside my bag:
I will be posting a write-up about the SAR mission on Monday sometime later today.
I'm going to bed as soon as I am done typing this because I am waking up around 4:00 am tomorrow to go search for a missing Danish hiker in the snow on San Jacinto. I am looking forward to this mission and to getting out in the snow. The tram ride is always fun, too. I'll take some pictures with my SD550 so you can see how it went.
My coverage of the marches has been mentioned on slate:
La marcha: As hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their political supporters turned out nationwide Monday, bloggers documented the demonstrations. At Metroblogging Los Angeles, amateur photographer Dave Bullock captures the scene on the West Coast. Explaining the pictures of demonstrators "feverishly waving their American flags," Bullock notes that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa "opened his talk with a polite request for the protesters to roll up and stow away their non-American flags. He said that the flags from other countries would not help their cause, and most of the protesters obliged his request." (See the complete collection of Bullock's photos on his personal Web site.)
Do you have a bike? Do you find yourself sitting in your car going insane, dreaming of being on two wheels rolling around the concrete jungle? Have you ever wanted to just ride around town and see some art or push your pedals with hundreds of other cyclists? Well if you answered yes to any of those questions you should grab your wheels and head down to one of the group rides that is taking place tomorrow and Friday night. Tomorrow is the Downtown Art Ride which Eric Richardson and I started about 6 months ago. The ride coincides with the Downtown Art Walk and we try and make it to all the galleries on the walk except the Library and the MOCAs. Bring a lock (actually we're trying to have somebody out front watching bikes) and a helmet along with a light and your drinking shoes as most of the galleries have free booze.
Then on Friday night is Los Angeles' largest group ride, Midnight Ridazz. The theme this month is ¡Viva la Revolución! ¡Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!
A few hours ago I attended the "Today We Act, Tomorrow We Vote" protest in Downtown Los Angeles. Once again, I took some photos and wrote some words about what I saw.
I started the day by forgetting to Spring forward. On my way to Echo Park, whilst mounting my bike when a light turned green, I ripped a 10" hole in my shorts. When I got to the park I was greeted by Mack, Eric and Wil and shortly after that my portrait was taken by a photog with a battery powered inkjet printer in tow. In said picture, I looked like a mutant squinting pirate, despite the fact that our team was not the arrrr'ing one. Furthermore I blew it when I passed on the free vegan tamales and beer.
Read the rest at blogging.la.
So I noted that my photos and my website were shown on CNN the other day, well I am going to be back on CNN. The weekly "On the Story" show is filmed tonight and will be shown at 7-8 p.m. ET Saturday and 1-2 p.m. ET Sunday. Today I got a FedEx'ed yellow pelican case containing a Mac Mini and an iSight. During the show "correspondents give you the inside word on the stories they cover each week" and I am going to be the featured "internet correspondent". Hopefully CNN won't spin it like Deutche-Welle spun it (~~starting at 8:00~~ [it is already down]), where they called me an "activist protesting the [HR4437] bill".
Update: Well that went pretty smoothly. I'm looking forward to seeing the show. They definitely didn't spin me as an evil blogger or an activist. Everyone on the crew was very nice and I actually enjoyed it. Hopefully I didn't look too nervous. Btw Abbi told me that the Saturday show will be preempted for some other coverage, but it will be show again on Sunday and possibly late at night.
LAT has a new editorial blog in which they mentioned me in a very positive light in one of their first posts:
Many of the local writers who attended came back with glowing reviews. Dave Bullock of Blogging.la had one of the best words/pictures combinations, and remarked: "It was the greatest show of patriotism I have seen my whole life, and the whole event really moved me."
They actually seem to be doing a really good job of covering what the LA blogosphere is talking about. In their latest post, they link to my photos from the walkout.
This morning I was contacted by CNN Internet Reporter, Jacki Schechner. She wanted to know if she could use my photos from the Gran Marcha on The Situation Room. I said go for it and she just let me know that my photos were featured at 5pm EST on the show. I didn't get a chance to see them so if you did and happened to record it somehow, please send me a copy! Here is the transcript from the CNN website:
I went to the largest protest ever in LA's history today. I wrote somewords about it and took some pictures:
I am currently putting together 3 photography portfolios: Macro Blossoms, Club Portraiture and Industrial Landscapes (those links aren't to my actual portfolios, but to the pool of my shots I will be compiling them from). I am hoping to eventually show my work and get some more of my club shots published. So far the club shots have been published in local LA magazine Jointz and the UK magazine M8. Last weekend I went to an undisclosed location in San Pedro and took a bunch of refinery and dock shots, most of them on my 20D, but I also took three rolls of Ilford B&W film on my new/old Canon 650. It had been about 15 years since the last time I developed any film, but being the impatient person that I am I called Ray over at the LA Photo Center and asked if the darkroom was available.[Read the rest at blogging.la]
Penelope and I ate at La Parilla twice in the last few weeks. Penelope had been bugging me for months to try La Parilla, as it won the LA Downtown News best mexican restaurant award in 2005. If it was up to me I would try every Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo before anything else, but when in a relationship on has to compromise from time to time.
From the trailer this movie looks totally surreal and somewhat disturbing. I bet it will hurt my brain.
I didn't realize this until just now, but supposedly I have famous photographers in my lineage, both from my father's side of the family. The two photographers are Edward S. Curtis the famous photographer of native americans and the nature photographer Wynn Bullock. I am trying to track down the full lineage to confirm the connection.
For the last 10 years or so I've been taking digital photos. Before my first digital camera I had a 35mm Konica SLR and I took some pretty cool pictures with it, which someday I will have to scan and add to my online galleries. I have been using my Canon EOS 20D almost daily for the last year and I decided I wanted to get a backup SLR that could take the same lenses that I have. I also decided I wanted to shoot film.
I didn't want to spend very much money because I am saving for a wedding and a honeymoon right now, so I looked on ebay and saw the first ever EOS, the Canon EOS 650 selling for about $15. I bought one (actually I bought 2, but hey they were cheap) and they arrived last week. I ordered a couple batteries and some film: Kodak Ultra Color 100UC, 400UC, Kodak Portrait 160, Kodak T-Max 100, Ilford Delta Pro 100 and Ilford XP-2 Super 400 from Adorama and waited patiently for it to arrive, which it did a couple of days ago.
Today I went to the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens to test it out. I took 4 rolls of film (all the C41 stuff) and shot it all, right after I shot the same subject with my 20D. I then took it to Ritz Camera at the Glendale Gallery Mall and had it developed, scanned and put on photocd.
You can see the results here, they are not too bad for my first attempt, but they aren't nearly as good as my digital shots. I am not sure why, but most of them came out overexposed, It may have to do with the camera only supporting TTL instead of the ETTL my MT-24EX can do. It may also have to do with the 650's metering system. Also if you zoom in all the way the photos are somewhat grainy, but to me it doesn't look like film grain and it may be artifacts from the somewhat low resolution scans.
I really love my 85mm 1.2 although it can be slow to focus, but the results the lens gives me are amazing. I just read that Canon is now coming out with an updated lens that focuses much faster. I am not going to go out and sell my lens right now, but I will probably upgrade sooner or later, probably later because I am going to upgrade to a 5D first... oh yeah and there is that wedding and honeymoon to pay for!
It has been about a month since the last Art Ride and some new galleries have been added to the route. Eric took the time to update the route and the map that the company he works for, Cartifact, was cool enough to let us use. You can download the map here in PDF [1 MB] or JPG [595KB] form. You'll see that we have added a note about spending only 10 minutes at each gallery. If we spend more time than that we will never make to to all the galleries on the route. See you at 5pm on Thursday at the Downtown Art Gallery.
Jim tagged me [as did Shannon] so here we go:
Some times I don't make the smartest decisions when it comes to my culinary explorations. There was that one time in Tokyo when I tried the chicken sashimi and repeatedly after a night at the bar I find myself drawn to the danger dog cart. Some of my hacker friends make something called Habeñero rum which is incredibly spicy and I've had it a few times, but it didn't prepare me for the Special 2 Spice Level Orochon Ramen.
This weekend I went out to the desert for my birthday and took some photos of the few flowers that I found in bloom. Compared to last year there were almost no flowers at all, but I am guessing after this rain that we had there will be many more in the next few weeks. Here are several of the shots I took:
The best part about the sparsity of wildflowers was that there were bugs on all the flowers that were alive.
Just got back from a birthday shooting trip in the desert. Penelope and I had a great time, but I'm glad to be back at home in my air conditioned loft with running water. Photos coming soon.
The other day I did a short write-up about many people's favorite sushi spot in Little Tokyo called Oomasa. I don't think my one paragraph really did it justice so I am going to expand upon it. I also took some drool inducing photos during my most recent foray between the noren curtains.
It was Friday night and Penelope got off after midnight. I was hungry for some hot ramen goodness so I hopped in the lopers' car and we headed down to my favorite area for late night dining, Little Tokyo. In my quest to try every restaurant in LT, starting with the spots that are open late, I have been to most of the eateries along First street south of San Pedro. Although my favorite low price restaurant is currently Suehiro, I was recently referred to Daikokuya in the comments on my post about Mr. Ramen.
I'm sure it's a surprise to nobody that I enjoy eating Japanese food. I spent some time in Japan a few years ago and these days I really enjoy visiting the various eateries in Little Tokyo. Here are some mini-reviews of establishments I've visited in the last few weeks that I enjoyed: Oomasa, Mr. Ramen, Yamazaki and Mikawaya.
If you are ever feeling skinny, there is a quick fix for that: Beard Papa's. Actually depending on what time you go to Beard Papa's, you may have to wait in a pretty long line, so the fix may not actually be that quick. Penelope and I went to Marukai in Gardena on Superbowl Sunday to get some tasty snacks and on the way in we say the Beard Papa's sign and I started drooling. The line stretched around the kiosk and with about 20 people waiting for their custard infused pastry fix.
I was in the West Side on Tuesday for a meeting and afterwards I stopped to grab a bite to eat at Shabu Hachi on Olympic. I have had plenty of Shabu Shabu in my life so I opted to try a Japanese dish I hadn't ever had before, Nabe. Nabe is an assortment of meat and veggies in a hot pot of water. There are several varieties of broth available, miso, soy and chanko which is a spicy bean paste, similar to what is often served with Korean BBQ. I opted for the seafood chanko nabe and along with an order of beef wrapped enoki mushrooms.
These were delicious although when they arrived at my table they were no longer alive
From Sushi-Ya in La Palma.
[This is an old project that CHS, Arclight and I did in which we melted down some old hard drives, I just revently uploaded the pictures again so I am reposting it here on my blog as well as on the original site: driveslag.eecue.com]
Due to the recent MIT study concerning data recovery from old hard drives, we decided that the only fool proof means of data removal was complete destruction of the disk platters.
We started with two hard drives that had failed for various reasons. The data on the disks was sensitive, like most personal data you will find on any random hard drive. We had considered various methods of destroying the data. These methods of destruction included: detonation, shooting with high calibre bullets, bulk magnetic eraser, grinding the platters, smashing the platters with a hammer. These methods would all thwart a novice data recovery party, but wouldn't be 100% effective due to scanning tunneling microscope recovery techniques.
We finally decided that the only sure way to thwart data recovery was to melt down all the aluminum contained in the platters. Slagging the drive would have two effects on the medium. First off it would convert it from a readable disk to any shape we decided to pour it into. Secondly it would nullify the magnetic properties of the coated aluminum.
We started by putting the drives into a steel crucible: 
Next CHS fired up Arclight's furnace and adjusted the flame for proper heat dispersion:
Then he inserted the crucible into the furnace:
After a few minutes we noticed toxic smoke rising from the furnace vent and decided to take a look inside.
We realized we should have removed the PCBs from the drives first... oh well:
Pretty soon the only solids left in the crucible were the steel caps that enclose the case:
Once we removed those we saw that the woven fiberglass inside the PCBs still remained:
We then poured the molten aluminum into out ingot cast:
Good luck recovering data from this:
Our prognosis: drive slagging is a fool-proof method to prevent data recovery.
[this was posted by chs to the forum on the original driveslag site:]
arclight and I originally built the furnace to carry out the plans in the gingery books for building a lathe, mill, shaper, etc..
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html
It's designed for melting down aluminum, zinc, brass/bronze primarily. but it could even be adapted to cast iron (AKA crucible steel).
its current capacity is 8 pounds of aluminum, or 25 pounds of brass/bronze plus or minus a pound depending on alloy.
it is propane fired, and the refractory lining was made from a formula we found on the backyardmetalcasting homepage, http://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/ It is NOT normal cement. it is designed specifically to take the intense heats involved with melting metals and designed to be porous so that moisture can vent out, rather than crack the lining or have the lining explode.
normally we use it for basic sand casting techniques.
This mini site was brought to you by 23b.org / 23.org and eecue.com
Category: Technology
In 2004 Simson Garfinkel gave a talk at the USENIX LISA conference about data on old hard drives. The report he wrote was actually what made us decide to do the drive slagging site in the first place. He featured our method of data removal in his slides which can be found at the link below. If you just want to see the slides click the permalink.
This new movie starring Jack Black looks hilarious. Jack black is the ultimate underdog luchadore, Nacho Libre.
I registered a domain and built a quick website for the Downtown Art Ride. I will be adding more info soon along with a great map that Eric Richardson created at his new job.
I just read this post over at 5thandSpring, and I just wanted to wish Jim and Celia the best in their relationship. I enjoy reading both of their blogs and I think it's great that they hooked up. I haven't been paying close attention, but is this the first blogger relationship in Downtown?
Tonight I ran in to Don Garza who was walking across the street on 6th. I recognized him from the various photos of him around the internet and as an avid reader of his blog I've been meaning to meet him so I ran across the street and introduced myself. Don is a cool guy and we talked about all kinds of stuff about downtown ranging from housing to the drug problem to my transgressions against harmless Furbys. He had just come from the neighborhood walk which I am going to attend someday soon. I'm looking forward to trying some of his tamales that he is going to make this weekend.
LA Foodblogging is giving away a couple of tickets to a wine tasting event next week. In order to win you have to write a Haiku. Here is what I wrote:
One of my caver friends, Tom Gilleland, who co-owns a cave with some of the people from my grotto, also runs a software development company called Beach Ware that specializes in games, stock media and educational software. His software hinges on a tongue-in-cheek algorithm which he calls faith based math [faithBasedMath() ?] and which he defines as:
The act of ignoring logic to come to a conclusion that meets your personal specifications. An illogical dichotomy often used by politicians, businessmen, and other rascals to justify a one-sided, self-weighted deal.
I have a problem. That problem is sensor dust. The Canon EOS 20D is a wonderful camera, but it is also a dust magnet. After owning the camera for about a month I noticed large spots on my images. After cleaning my lens I did some research and found that the sensor attracts dust and the dust shows up on the images when you have the lens stopped down. I found a great way to test this was to take a photo of something bright (the sky) with the lens stopped down all the way, when I did this it was pretty painful to see how much dust was on there. I looked around for a solution and I saw some things that seemed somewhat sketchy to try and also saw the option of taking my camera in to have it serviced which seemed like a waste of money.
I was browsing around on the Adorama website I found some products made by a company called Visible Dust. These brushes, swabs and solutions are made specifically for cleaning CMOS sensors and the company actually started out making products for cleaning lab optics. After reading some 3rd party reviews of their products I ordered the 1.6x brush set and patiently awaited its arrival.
When it came I opened up my 20D, put it on sensor cleaning mode and cleaned the sensor. I turned off the camera, put the lens on and took some pictures stopped down, about 90% of the dust was gone, but there were now a few small streaks where what must have been an oily goo had been smeared by the brushes. So that night I ordered the sensor clean kit, that comes with sterile poly swabs and a non-alcohol cleaning solution. The kit came today and I opened it up and cleaned my sensor. I now have 0 spots on my sensor. Yay!
I am really happy with the results from the new prepared slides I ordered from eBay. I was a little worried about the quality on the cheap Chinese import slides, but they are really well done. Here is the first round of photos I took. Or click below for some flickrs:
For xmas I bought both my fiance and myself a new point and shoot compact camera. I had previously owned a Sony DSC-T1 and I really liked it, but I really love my Canon EOS 20D so I picked up a pair of the SD550s. The camera takes wonderful photos, but when I take pictures of anything close and the flash fires the photo is totally overexposed. This shouldn't be a problem with a $500 digital camera, it certainly wasn't with the DSC-T1. I hope that Canon will come out with a firmware update to regulate the flash properly.
UPDATE Ok so after talking to a salesperson at Samy's Camera where I bought the camera and some experimentation I got the exposure working ok. I turned on Macro mode (even though I'm shooting from a couple feet away) and that helped and then I tried Manual mode with the metering set to center weighted and that fixed the problem. Also using the redeye reduction flash helps too.
Wow what a difference! Even with 14,000 images in my Library, the app is snappy and responsive unlike previous versions. The interface is much cleaner and the bug when deleting photos from large albums has been fixed. It will make uploading pictures a much more enjoyable activity which is a good thing if you want to see my photos.
I just got a mighty mouse and I love it. The scroll ball is tacitly pleasing and give a smooth clicking feel when you spin it, plus it scrolls both up and down and side to side. The right click is nice, but you have to activate it in the Keyboard and Mouse menu. I also like the side clicks. Good show apple!
I love my sweetie pie! We finally set a date, July 9th 2006 at the New Otani garden! I am excited.
I have been drooling over the extremely fast and slow focusing Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L lens, and a few days ago, I went to Samy's Camera and bought it. I really love the lens although I'm still getting used to the extremely shallow DOF that the gaping 1.2 f-stop creates. I also going to need to pick up a neutral density filter if I want to take daytime photos with a wide open aperture. Here are the three sets I have uploaded so far. I love this lens!
I picked up a T-Mount adapter for my Canon EOS 20D and hooked it up to my microscope. The pictures didn't come out all that great, but I will keep trying. Although the chili powder shot looks pretty cool in an abstract kind of way.
Penelope and I ate at Kobe Ramen last night. It was ok, but I think we should have tried the noodles instead of random small dishes. In other news I have posted a bunch more photos from the last year that I have been hoarding:
When I visited Japan a few years ago, one of my favorite food experiences was a little hole in the wall bar in rural Japan near Osaka. The little dishes of interesting fare really hit the spot after a night of drinking and the hot shochu with umeboshi helped keep my buzz going and my body warm. When I walked into Suehiro last Sunday night at midnight, a quick glance at the specials board let me know that this was my kind of place. Just a warning, there is a 90% chance that you won't like some of the things I ate at Suehiro, but if you are adventurous you should give them a try, if not there is still plenty of tame and tasty items to be had.
I use iPhoto to sort through and upload my photos to my webserver. It normally works pretty well, although once you have a few thousand photos in one library it really lags. The only real problem I have run in to a few times is the way that iPhoto deals with the information you add to your photos. I just sorted through about 500 photos, creating 4 groups and naming about 100 photos, then all of the sudden iPhoto crashed and when I reopened it, all my work was gone. Would it really be that hard to write to a file every time a change was made? Maybe instead of having one huge file describing all the photos in the library, iPhoto could have individual meta-files for each image file, or better yet, why not just store the info I type in the EXIF header? Oh well here I go again.
So I've been sitting on a crapton of photos from 2005 that I have been uploading over the last few days. Here is a listing of the galleries I have uploaded so far:
The Downtown Art Ride will be taking place today starting at 5:30 at the Downtown Art Gallery, which we will be leaving at 6:00. We will be checking out every gallery on the Art Walk except MOCA Grand and The Library. Here is a bit more information about the ride.
Tomorrow night is Midnight Ridazz and the theme is Camp Ridazz:
WE RIDE THIS FRIDAY THE 13TH. This isn't just any Friday night. It's the grand opening of Camp Ridazz! Never you mind about that rumored death curse, our counselors guarantee there have been no murder attempts or unexplained disappearances on the Midnight ride since the last Friday the 13th. So bundle up for a good time and head for the great outdoors.
Bring a few bucks for Pabst in the cabin.
Don't litter. No Rida left behind.
Meet at 9:30, Pioneer Chicken, Echo Park & Sunset.
IMPORTANT UPDATE I will not be able to lead the Art Ride today due to some last minute work related issues that I tried to get out of, but was unable to. Please don't let this stop you from riding around the Art Walk... I will be back leading the ride next month.
Yesterday I took my mother out to lunch at Thousand Cranes on the garden terrace of the New Otani hotel in Little Tokyo. I had the Tenshin Sampler ($22.50)which was basically kaiseki, a large assortment of small dishes each with unique flavors and ingredients. The first course was three delicious dishes, the first was two cubes of deliciously slimy mountain yam with a vinegar chili sauce that reminded me of kimchi brine along with some small orange eggs that were larger than flying fish or smelt roe, but much smaller than salmon roe, but just as fishy tasting and some shredded raddish of some type, possible daikon. The second dish was an unagi and shittake savory custard that came in a covered dish and included a spoon for easier dish to mouth transport. The content of the third plate totally escapes my mind and I didn't take a photograph of it, but I remember enjoying it.
When the main course came, I could tell my mom was jealous that she ordered the City Sampler($19.95) which didn't come with a first course, but when her tray of dishes came she was very pleased with her selection. My main course consisted of 6 dishes, not including the steamed rice and sauces. Clockwise from the top, the first dish was some type of fibrous tuber in a sweet soy sauce with two pieces of gooey okra on the side. The second dish was several thick slices of salmon and yellow tail sashimi with both daikon and western radish, seaweed, shizo leaf, lemon, wassabi and soy sauce. The third dish was a steaming hot bowl of miso soup with the customary tofu, seaweed and green onions. The fourth dish was a small sampling of daikon, cucumber and carrot pickles that were firm and mildly acetic. The fifth dish was an unusual twist on the conventional shrimp tempura obtained by covering the battered shrimp with crunch rice spheres before frying, along with typically prepared yam and enoki mushroom tempura, the sauce for which was enhanced with the optionally added cone of daikon radish and garlic. The sixth and final dish of the main course was a sizable portion of perfectly broiled yellowtail garnished with a crisp slice of lotus root, daikon and lemon atop a bed of tender sea vegetables flavored with bits of bonito.
The service was great and the desert of mango ice cream and a sugar cone cookie complimented the complimentary hot green tea served after the meal. The food was wonderful and I look forward to going back soon.
After lunch we toured the garden which Penelope and I are considering as a wedding venue. My mom took advantage of the open wireless access point and checked her email and I helped her with a few things on her PowerBook and then we walked down the stairs to Weller Court where she went book shopping and then we parted ways, she headed to Marukai and I to do some programming. [Photos are here]
One thing that ZDnet forgot to mention in their article on the odds of what will come at Macworld is the iSAN, which will be some kind of Fibre Channel switch that can turn the XRaid into a true SAN device. We were going to buy an XRaid and our contact at Apple told us to hold off for the SAN device that will be debuting at the upcoming MacWorld.
~~I've been saying this was going to happen for a while now, it just makes sense that Google would create its own operating system. I actually hadn't thought too much about a cheap computer, but I suppose that makes sense, too bad WalMart will be selling it.~~ Google just announced that they will be selling TV content via Google Video and also that they are offering the "Google Pack" that comes with Firefox, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar, Picasa, Google Earth, and Adobe Reader 7. No Google OS Yet.
