Continue reading »]]> Schneier points out that Facebook is a privacy train wreck waiting to happen; something I have long believed. People need to take heed and be careful about what they reveal to whom. We are only at the very earliest of stages with our automated privacy specification and/or features. Life and personal privacy is going to get a lot worse before it gets better:

Privacy Violations by Facebook Employees:

“I don’t know if this is real, but it seems perfectly reasonable that all of Facebook is stored in a huge database that someone with the proper permissions can access and modify. And it also makes sense that developers and others would need the ability to assume anyone’s identity.

Click through to Schneier’s site for a reference to the original material.

(Via Schneier on Security.)

Continue reading »]]> Website #FAILs.

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am.

This amounts to assuming that all French speaking people are in France, that all English speaking people are in England and so on.

What does RFC 2616 have to say about this?

14.4 Accept-Language

The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a
response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.
…

Nothing there about location? This is a classic assumption / layer violation in a design.

The worst offenders here are, by in large, financial institutions. When I visit ING Direct, they redirect me immediately to the Canadian login screen. Trouble is — I don’t have a Canadian account. Worse — there is no button to override their error the button to fix the problem is buried and two layers deep. Outsmarted by not too clever web developers.

Ouch. That hurts.

Wonder what would happen if I visited with a language preference set to en_DE or en_FR?

Continue reading »]]> Microsoft has apparently released some advertising for their new Office flagship collection (Office 2010). The movie can be seen on YouTube here.

I find it upsetting that they can spend lavishly promoting nothing — note that there are zero product shots in this ad. It is pure blockbuster hype.

Arial!? Don’t get me started on Arial. Perhaps MSFT could have spent a little money improving the Windows font engines and licensing some non-horrid fonts from a reasonable foundry. I still think Arial is a poorman’s Helvetica and will never be a substitute.

Checkout Helvetica vs. Arial if you haven’t already seen this.

Surprisingly, there are still quite a few pages on this topic indexed at Google.

Continue reading »]]> Sometimes you just have to wonder what the web developers were smoking. A large trading company recently told me the following after I failed to remember my password in three attempts:

Beacuse I might not be using a web browser to do anything else.

So there goes any hope that I’ll get that task done. They are forcing me to ignore them until I can restart my browser. Who really things this is OK? Why to consumers settle for this kind of quality? We should all know better than this.

Continue reading »]]> Although not as direct as the approach I’ve long though useful, Google Labs has introduced the Gmail Goggles feature. In their words:

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

This is almost what I’ve proposed to colleagues in the past: namely an afterhours finger-prick device than can detect trace amounts of system inhibitors, like, say, alcohol and refuse to launch your MTA. Your precious mail would be held until morning, at least. Whereupon you can review it and make the appropriate changes (read: deletions) that a professional adult would make.

Kudos to Mike for pointing this excellent innovation out. If only it worked over IMAPS too.

]]> http://polyphase.ca/2008/10/07/mail-goggles/feed/ 0 http://polyphase.ca/2008/09/23/some-photo-statistics/ http://polyphase.ca/2008/09/23/some-photo-statistics/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:05:27 +0000 Alan http://polyphase.ca/?p=258

Continue reading »]]> A co-worker of mine, Darren, suggested that it would be interesting to see what focal lengths are most popular in our image collections. He whipped up some perl code that would recurse through a directory hierarchy and spit out some data on lens focal length. I expanded the code a little so spit out per-image information and did some rudimentary digging with R.

One of the drawbacks, of course, is that only my EXIF tagged photos are represented here, or, put another way, only my digital photographs are represented here. I don’t much expect that the results would change in the film archives, except for the fact that I’d expect the 50mm focal length to return and 85mm to shine. Clearly I use these lengths a lot. You can also clearly see that I have no sub 70mm zoom capability in that the data shows very distinct peaks under the bottom end of the 70-200 zoom.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the 70-200/2.8 zoom is used almost exclusively at 70 or 200 and then again with the 1.4x TC when shooting sports. Combined with the 1.6x crop factor inherent in the 20D body and you can see that I have peaks at 320 and 450.

I also ran a quick check on metering modes, just to see what I use. I guessed that Av and M would tie with Tv a distant third. I was wrong. I shoot a ton more Manual mode (M) than I thought. (Thank you Ansel Adams and all you zone system junkies!).

Apertures – once again, I tend to shoot a lot at wide-open or nearly wide open. This is largely what drives my desire to keep my primes and my L zooms. Nothing, not even IS, can simulate the bokeh and speed of nice fast glass.