Last night I went to a lecture series hosted by the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The talk, on the evolution of human color vision, was terrific—and I was given the opportunity to take a tour of their lab facilities.
(Click the image above for a small gallery of additional pictures).
I have a thermal imaging camera made by FLIR Systems. These cameras are really interesting devices; they pick up long-wavelength infrared radiation (wavelengths of 8-12μm, versus 380-750nm for visible light). We’ve all seen objects heated until they’re hot enough to glow visibly, but it takes a lot less heat to glow in the infrared spectrum!
Why, you might ask, do I have a thermal camera? Because. That’s why. Actually, there is a reason.
If you’re not a pretty serious gadgeteer, this post isn’t for you. Nothing to see here; move along…
The intersection of hardware and software has always been an interesting place, even more so when security engineering is involved.
I recently bought a Rigol DS1074Z oscilloscope. It’s a neat gadget and I’m really pleased with it.
So I’m waiting for a package to be delivered via FedEx SmartPost. SmartPost is designed to reduce costs associated with the “last mile” of delivery. Stuff travels via FedEx to the local post office, then the U.S. Postal Service handles the actual delivery.
My experience with SmartPost service has been terrible, but this was bad even by dealing-with-the-post-office standards.
I spent a fair bit of time today chasing down a disturbing problem.
One of my clients reported they were seeing terrible performance on a cloud-hosted application despite having a speedy Internet connection.
A bit of investigation revealed this to be true.
Continue reading So Where Do You Think the Demand Comes From?
I just got an email from Kickstarter, the popular crowdfunding platform. They were writing to let their users know that they’ve joined the ranks of the companies who’ve suffered a data compromise.
I hope that they’re well-treated by their users during this crisis, because they’re doing a really good job.
I’ve run this website since 1996. I haven’t updated it frequently, in part because it’s never been really easy to do so. A few minutes ago, I noticed that the last major update to the landing page was made in 2002, over a decade ago.
So I’m going to attempt to promote the tools I’d used for a few blog postings (the last of which was, embarrassingly, in 2008) to be the primary content management mechanism for the website. I’m hopeful this will be an easy process—because technology upgrades are never more complicated than expected, right?