four reasons to give blood

A. Alexeieff, illus. for Russian Fairy Tales, 1945

i gave blood this week. it was fun! here are four reasons i like giving blood, ordered from most to least important [i have to give partial credit to kyle for a couple of these]:

1. it is uplifting to see so many people at the donation center who have taken like an hour out of their days to give something anonymously to people they don't know. it is kind of like the opposite of vitriolic comments on the internet.
2. you may (accurately) call yourself a reverse vampire.
3. there is a good chance you will get complimented on how fast your body can pump blood into a little bag, or on how easy it is to find your veins. i'd wager this is one of the only situations in which you can be particularly proud of the exceptional nature of your circulatory system.
4. the feeling of moral superiority over people who spend that hour just sitting at the computer reading crap on the internet. ha ha, yes, i mean you!

Here's a link to the Red Cross's website where you too can sign up to give blood.

how i outsmarted powerpoint

I am making the switch from Keynote and my (increasingly) irritable Powerbook to PowerPoint and my brand new Windows 7 laptop. All my old presentations are in Keynote, and it is less than fun to convert them to PowerPoint so that I can steal slides from them in the present/future. Anyways, I was getting annoyed at PowerPoint for being retarded with regard to inserting videos. Apparently, PowerPoint uses something called the Media Control Interface to play videos inserted into PowerPoint rather than the ubiquitous Windows Media Player (see How PowerPoint 2003 Plays Multimedia Files in a Presentation). My videos were all encoded with the Xvid mpeg4 codec. They played in PowerPoint, but they looked rather crappy. The videos had more compression artifacts and fine lines looked pixelated.

Remembering that once upon a time I figured out that PowerPoint would play mpeg4-encoded videos if I changed the .avi extension to .mpg, I changed the extension on the videos to .mpg, and they played at a much higher quality, to me indistinguishable from how Windows Media Player plays them. Here's a screenshot of a slide with the last frame of the same video using the .avi extension (left) vs the .mpg extension (right).



I don't know what PowerPoint is doing differently with the mpg vs the avi extension -- is it using Windows Media Player within PowerPoint instead of Media Control Interface? No idea. Whatever, it looks a lot better.

By the way, so far, Keynote version a way long time ago is so far beating PowerPoint 2007 by a mile in my experience so far. Hopefully, I'll get more used to PowerPoint with practice. At least I don't have to use the Windows Equation Editor like in the days of yore. There is now a Latex Equation Editor that works great for me.

part man. part machine. all cop.

I spend a good fraction of my waking hours with my hand attached to my mouse and keyboard, and my eyes glued to my monitor. While I can live without them, my senses and abilities would be rather limited, perhaps akin to if you cut off my arms or gave me a stuffy nose. These peripherals are connected to my computer, which is in turn connected to the Interweb. The internet is connected to you through your own monitor and keyboard and mouse. Where do I end and where does the technology begin? Where does the technology end and where do you begin? Are we cyborgs? Are we cyborg appendages of one large internettular collective? Such deep questions to ponder! Not really! I'm not that lame. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor are all eminently detachable. Way more detachable than like that one lady's machine gun leg in Planet Terror or Darth Vader's suit in Star Wars (you all knew it was Star Wars, but it seemed weird to specify Planet Terror and not Star Wars). So, doy, I am not yet a cyborg. But, wouldn't it be cool if I was? Maybe when we all get chips in our brains so that we can control computers purely with our minds (and, yes, so the Man can track and control our every move), then we will be cyborgs. Ooh, you know what else we should get implanted? I want to have a telephone implanted in my hand, with the microphone in my pinky and the speaker in my thumb, so that I can put my hand up to my head in the universal sign for telephone and actually make calls. That would be funny forever! Here's a diagram:
Update 09/12/09: Someone stole my idea!!!
Lookin' Bad: Bluetooth Ringphone.

sarkozy does not want to be at the bottom of a bloody well

I just read this article about how Sarkozy's aids got short people to stand behind him for a televised speech: Short People Ordered to Stand Behind President Nicolas Sarkozy during Speech. It's funny! Cuz he's short! Ooh, and I'm not! Here are some pictures of Sarkozy being uncomfortable with his height:

President Nicolas Sarkozy & some little guys, Telegraph.co.uk

Footstool, Telegraph.co.uk

Tiptoeing, Sydney Morning Herald

And here is Napoleon in Time Bandits:

securing your windows machine

Information Security, by Micke-fi

I just installed Windows 7 on my brand new laptop. My previous laptop was a Mac and at school I always use Linux, and I am taking the Windows-malware threat seriously. I read the article How to Protect your Computer from Malware and Hackers. Based on their suggestions and some googling, I ended up with the following configuration. Note that I am no expert on Windows or computers (tho I do have a PhD in Computer Science and really should know more than I do), but I figured I would share the fruits of my googling anyways. If someone more knowledgeable than me reads this and has suggestions, please let me know! Here's my security system:

• Windows Defender comes installed by default on Vista and Windows 7. I left it on.
  
• avast! Home Edition to protect against viruses. I've used avast for years, since it was recommended by a roommate long ago. It is free and awesome. The Security in a Box site has a guide for installing avast. I consider the McAfee 30-day trial that came installed on my laptop when I bought it in the same class as the Yahoo! toolbar every program is always trying to get me to install with other programs I want.
  
• Spybot Search & Destroy to protect against spyware. This program is not as automatic as avast, so I recommend reading the Spybot guide on the Security in a Box site. Vista and Windows 7 come with Windows Defender installed as well. Googling various combinations of "Spybot" and "Defender" did not give me a clear answer on whether Spybot is redundant given Defender or vice-versa, but I am lead to believe that they can both be installed simultaneously without conflict, so I opted for both. I did not install the TeaTimer option, as my understanding is that it is a resource hog, reports more issues than necessary, and that Defender is a more efficient way of accomplishing similar levels of protection. This means that I will need to run the update, scan, and immunize functions every once in a while to keep my computer up-to-date to the latest threats. Running the Spybot scanner, the only issues raised were cookies installed through Internet Explorer. I've set up Firefox to delete all cookies when I close Firefox, so Firefox cookies were not a problem.
  
• Comodo Firewall. So originally I decided that Windows' default firewall would be enough, but reading more about it, people seem pretty adamant that real firewall software is necessary. So, I turned off Windows' firewall and installed Comodo. I couldn't find anywhere to download just the Firewall program, so I ended up installing the Comodo Internet Security, and then disabling the Antivirus component. There are a bunch of configuration options. Here is what I chose:
  
  • In the Configuration Wizard, I chose to install the Firewall but not the Antivirus or LivePCSupport.
    
  • I then chose to install the Firewall with Optimum Proactive Defense. This installs the Defense+ component of Comodo. As far as I can tell from some quick googling, there may be some redundancy between Windows Defender and Defense+, but it is not clear to me that either is completely unnecessary, and both can run simultaneously.
  • I unchecked the "Install Toolbar", change your default search engine, and change your homepage options.
  • I chose not to use the Comodo SecureDNS Servers.
Comodo warned me about a number of programs once I restarted Windows, including services.exe which appears to be a Windows native program, and avast and McAfee (see below) programs. I let it know they were all okay (as far as I know). I will also note that Comodo, unlike Windows' Firewall, did not warn me when I tried to run NoMachine. Either it knew about Windows' original exceptions, or it knew that NoMachine was a-okay already.

• I set Firefox to remove all cookies every time I quit. I've used this setting for years. You can add exceptions for sites you trust. The number of cookies stored is always disturbing to me.
  
• Following the suggestions, I installed the following Firefox add-ons:
  • Formfox shows you where form information is being sent when you hit a submit button.
  • McAfee SiteAdvisor. McAfee (which I am wary of) maintains a list of safe and unsafe sites. This Firefox extension shows you the classification for sites you visit and adds a little icon to search results. I disabled the safe searchbox.
    
  • I chose not to install noscript, though it was recommended, cuz it sounds exceptionally annoying. Let's hope that all the other software I've put in place is enough!

Resource usage: I'm looking at the Windows Task Manager. In terms of memory, avast seems to be using about 22 MB in total, SiteAdvisor seems to be using about 4 MB, Spybot seems to be using about 3 MB, and Comodo seems to be using about 3 MB. They all seem to be using about 0% of my processor (I have an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1GHz processor).

Oh yeah, Kyle recommended this article on setting passwords for the many accounts you have online: Fix your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes by my least favorite tech writer Farhad Mintjulep (the advice is good, tho). It took me *way* more than 5 minutes to fix mine. I've considered using Keepass, but it sounds like a pain if you want to log in to anything on a computer that is not your own (you need to carry around a usb stick with your Keepass database on it). Here's another article on how easy it is to hack various password types:
How I'd Hack your Weak Passwords.