It's all about trust...

DO NOT FOLLOW THIS LINK IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY BOOGERS (OR SODOMY)
From Kevin Smith:

Why is seeing a finger up someone’s nose considered such bad form? I see someone picking their nose, I’m like “Now THERE’S a motherfucker I can TRUST.”

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Let's go camping!

http://www.apple.com/retail/camp/
The kids spent Monday morning at Barton Creek Mall, which is about a gajillion miles from our house, but also happens to be the location of the nearest Apple Store. They were at Music Camp and each made their own Garage Band mix. They both sound pretty good. Hays' song is a somewhat one-dimensional, Hi-N-R-G rant. It comes on strong, lasts about a minute and dies quickly. Griffin's has a considerable amount of funk to it and she really composes a good riff with a nifty back-beat bass.

Of course, they immediately came home and started working on other tunes on their own minis. The only problem is that 256 MB of RAM is hardly enough to do any sort of live playback during testing. I think I'll need to go searching for a putty knife....

On Wednesday (tomorrow), they're going to Movie Camp and they'll be taking their own cameras. Of course, they both have a very unique eye when it comes to photography (Griffin's "Steak Dinner" pic is one of my all-time favs), so I'm sure they'll have fun. I'm hoping that it's not a 4-hour tutorial on The Ken-Burns-Effect. No matter, it should be neat (and they're both wanting to do some movie and game stuff. Maybe I'll get Griffin to do the cinematics for the game Hays and I are working on (She's also done some artwork for it).

Dan Brown, the killer.

Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence

The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier..., and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms.

Cool.

Police Seize Camera With Pitt-Jolie Photos

So, this in and of itself isn't all that interesting. But take a gander at this seemingly innocuous statement:

Local police [went] to recover a digital camera's memory stick after [the photos] were tracked to Keys.

Heck, those photos could have been tracked down through any number of means:

1. The ISP that Keys used to "upload" the photos may have cooperated.
2. Keys may have been using an identifying account to whereever he posted them.
3. He could have even watermarked them with "Copyright 2006 William Keys".

Now read this:
Digital Cameras Have Unique Fingerprints

But the JPEG format tends to be the most ubiquitous image format for cameras and for the Internet. A part of JPEG is that it's a "lossy" image format, meaning that you can dial-in how good you want the picture to look via its compression settings. If you alter the image by resizing it or changing the compression, will that alter the fingerprint? Of course, since the fingerprint is an artifact of the camera, these techniques would have to be done in "post processing" -- using a software tool to make the changes on your computer after the images are retrieved. There are lots of techniques that are available for encoding a digital signature into an image, but according to Scheier's source article, this looks like it's a more genericized formula for identifying the make and model a camera that took the pictures.

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