September 7th, 2010
William Gibson has a new novel, Zero History, that concludes the loose trilogy that began with Pattern Recognition and continued with Spook Country. I couldn’t finish Pattern Recognition – it left me completely cold, but Spook Country blew me away. I’m looking forward to Zero History, which continues his examination of the dark side of marketing and branding. Voiceland Today has a long interview with Gibson in which he discusses the themes behind his recent books.
In simple terms, what does the title Zero History refer to?
It has to do with the state of the character Milgrim’s credit history after his decade of benzodiazepine addiction. By not having had a credit card or a telephone number, he’s become this sort of mythological ghost. A non-person. “Zero history” is what the records guy at a police department would tell you when you call them up and say, “I want everything you’ve got on a guy like this.” It would be, “Zero history.”
I wonder if zero history would be an enviable state in which to be.
I think it would be a very tough place to be. But it’s interesting that it’s a place to be at all. It’s interesting that that place is there. It will be very strange, 20 years from now, to know who will be the people that you can’t Google. It used to be that the people you could Google were prominent in some way in some digital industry. Now, increasingly, you can Google everybody. So who will be unGoogleable? The Amish? Will some religion maybe decide one day that to be Googleable is unclean? Like, you have to not leave any traces on the net…
Update: Here’s a glowing review of Zero History from Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow.
Posted in SF, books | No Comments »
September 7th, 2010
If you’ve browsed photography sites like Flickr, you’ve probably seen examples of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos. They have a wide dyamic range that mimics what the human eye can see and saturated, vivid colour. It’s fairly easy to create this effect with a digital camera, by taking several photos with differing exposures and merging the results in a graphics editor. Flickr user Leviathor has put together an easy-to-follow guide that explains how to create realistic HDR photos.
This tutorial will attempt to demonstrate how to make a realistic HDR, one that is virtually indistinguishable from a single exposure. The biggest goal is producing a tutorial that can stand as a standard by which anyone can learn to create a balanced HDR. Ultimately, the processing choices are yours. These are the building blocks.
Before we start, some background about high dynamic range (HDR) that are often misunderstood or misconstrued. HDR is two or more exposures, and in many cases, more is not necessarily merrier. For simplicity’s sake (Occam’s Razor), use only the minimum number of exposures to cover the dynamic range of the scene. Today’s auto-bracketing features allow for a neutral image, plus an exposure on either side of the neutral image (±1/3 stop to ±2 stops). A proper exposure on a decent digital camera covers about six stops of information; bracketing at ±2 renders approximately ten stops of information. That is enough to cover all but the most extreme circumstances, like shooting into the sun, or interiors with wild lighting.
Now that I have a camera in which I can control the exposure accurately, this is something that I plan to try.
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September 7th, 2010
If you’re using MadCap Flare, or planning to, check out A Flare for Help, a new site by Laura Johnson, which bills itself as “Help you use MadCap Flare effectively”. I’ve had a browse through the site and I’m going to add it to my (too short) list of useful Flare resources. It’s a new site. so there’s not a lot there yet, but what is there is quite useful.
Posted in MadCap., technical communication | No Comments »
September 6th, 2010
As you may have read earlier, Toronto SF author Peter Watts won a well-deserved Hugo for his novella, “The Island”. Peter’s had an interesting year, not all of it in a good way, having been assaulted by U.S. border thugs when returning to Canada, and eventually getting a suspended sentence on the trumped up charge of obstructing a border officer. He did get to fly to Australia after a fan-lead campaign raised funds to bring him to Aussiecon 4. Here’s his blog post about that experience, witty, funny, and touching.
If wifi were water, this place would be Arrakis. Free bandwidth is an alien concept in Australia. A minute of internet is treasured more than the rarest jewel (or at least, it costs as much).
Notwithstanding which, this country rocks.
I could go on about the fact that the neurotoxins that developed in this place are, for reasons which remain unclear, the most powerful on earth. I could rave about the fact that — at least here in the east — nonhumans have rights, that there are strict limits on how far you can displace a marsupial that’s living in your chimney because after all, they were here first. I could go on about how it must rock to have a prime minister who is female, single, childless, and proudly atheist (often all at the same time), except for the fact that this country has not actually had a prime minister the whole time I’ve been down here. (I’d be more than happy to give them ours, but I like these guys too much.) I could reflect on the nature of an sf community that actually has an award for “Best Fannish Cat”, that categorises their lower-end contributors as “Cheapskate Members”, the $50-contributors as “Rescuers of Kittens”, and officially designates $100-plus contributors as “Absolute Fucking Legends”. I could talk about clean streets, and street art (all following pics are courtesy of Cat Sparks, btw, unless otherwise noted):
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September 6th, 2010
Malware is getting more sophisticated. Now we have to watch out for malware that imitates browser warning pages – the ones that pop up when you hit a site that your browser thinks might be infected with something nasty. It looks like the key thing to watch out for is a request on the page to run a security scan – this will download the malware.
Beyond the warning pages, the actual malware looks like the real deal: it allows you to scan files, tells you when you’re behind on your updates, and enables you to change your security and privacy settings. Performing a scan results in the product finding malicious files, but of course it cannot delete them unless you update, which requires paying for the full version. Attempting to buy the product will open an HTML window that provides a useless “Safe Browsing Mode” with high-strength encryption. To top it all off, the rogue antivirus webpage looks awfully similar to the Microsoft Security Essentials webpage; even the awards received by MSE and a link to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center have been copied.
While the malware is a pretty good attempt, it’s not perfect. The goal is to get the user to download and install something, shelling out some cash in the process, which neither of the three browser vendors would ever recommend. The Firefox warning page, meanwhile, has an obvious typo (“Get me our of here”). In addition, it’s suspicious that a webpage is going out of its way to tell you it is protecting your purchase. It’s also not hard to check that the supposedly detected files do not actually exist on the user’s computer. All of these missteps should raise red flags immediately; having said that, we’ve still not before seen this level of detail and effort from the bad guys.
Posted in Another thing to worry about, security | No Comments »
September 5th, 2010
The 2010 Hugo Awards for best science fiction and fantasy published in 2009 have been announced at Aussiecon 4. I’m happy to see that Toronto author Peter Watts won the Best Novelette award for “The Island”. Best Novel was a tie between China Miéville’s The City and the City and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (which also won the Nebula award this year). Charlie Stross won the Best Novella award for “Palimpsest”. Sadly, Lloyd Penney didn’t win Best Fan Author, which went to long-time pro and recent blogger, Fred Pohl. Full results are on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog.
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