RKNet Blog... Thing

It is important to be beautiful, so start from the inside.

Please discuss.

By now you may have seen the “seam carving” image editing video, demonstrating a new, kickass way of resizing images to retain the key elements and pick out threads that are “less relevant” to retain the overall feel of the original image.

Thanks to the glory of my del.icio.us feed, I’ve found a flash tool that will resize web-hosted images in this fashion. The tool’s author is still working on some of the more advanced features discussed in the video, but right now it’s really fun to play with the vertical and horizontal resizing.

Load a few of your flickr images and play with it!

A short film about a young man who likes to draw. In the quivery, rich, hand-drawn art I see shades of Bill Plympton and Don Hertzfeldt, and Gerald Scarfe.

Yet the twin animators, Joy and Noelle, do exude a lot of unique character. The music fits like a well-oiled glove, and the voices are at once genuine and caricature of their intended characters.

If you enjoy this dilly of a pickle, and also maintain (for whatever reason) a MySpace account, I recommend popping by their MySpace Video spot and let them know how much you enjoyed it!

Perhaps so much that you wish you were one?
Deck out your hellspawn in Mudkips this year for halloween, via BuyCostumes.com. Note the maniacal expression on the model’s face. Clearly, he loves him some Mudkips.

Tip off courtesy of loyal reader from the ormgas IRC: efiloN! :D

Editor’s note: you may have come here because you noticed a small notice at the bottom of the “wizard has turned you into a mudkips” picture. I want to go on record as saying I did NOT create that image. However, a lot of people were hotlinking to the copy of it posted above. Rather than shut down hotlinking altogether, I have opted to let people know where the image they are hotlinking to is being hosted. I’m glad you stopped by. :) Please feel free to peruse the rest of the site and comment.

Moving up in the del.icio.us ranks is a little site called Cork’d. The concept? “Review, Cellar, and Share Wine”. Internet savvy dipsomaniacs rejoice! Now you have a place to chat about your maddening obsession with fermented grape juice of various ages, with all the charms that only a Web 2.0 named site could provide.

They’ve got a 100 point rating system for wines, and a handy price scale of 1-4 dollar signs to indicate general cost of wines.

They seem to have dozens upon dozens of different wines, but they’re lacking the one that really pops my cork: 2004 Georges Dubeuf Beaujolais Villages.

Had I the means to maintain a cellar, I’d probably be all over this site. Just like any other lifehack/organizer tool, this one’s looking pretty good at what it’s all about. Even though I’m not ready to make an account and start going all ga-ga over my perfectly preserved, carefully selected wines, I’ll definitely use this site as a reference for buying bottles of special occasion wines. Always handy to know if that bottle with the pretty label in the store is delicious or junk.

Wired’s Underwire blog has just delivered quite the scoop!

The Burning Man festival’s traditional “burning man” figure burst into flames a full 5 days ahead of schedule, during last night’s total lunar eclipse.

Keep your eyes on their article, as they’ll update when they have more information as to whether this was a technical issue or arson.

Check out the article now for a huge picture of them hosing down the traditional figure after the incident.

This song is great. The video possibly more so, in fact. It runs the gamut between 50’s black and white swagger, David Lee Roth-esque 80’s video style, and that unique kind of long haired 90’s flash of wit and attitude. The song is as all-over-the-place as the video itself. It’s a good time all around. Rock ‘n’ Roll Damnation has more info on the band for those who totally dig it.

Gentle readers, I also wish to assure you that you have my solemn promise that I will not use the term “‘tude” ever again, unless making fun of someone.

I’m back in the humid, smelly Northeast and I figured I’d flex the ol’ guest-blogging muscles before they dwindle into insignificance… anyway, I was at SES San Jose 2007 last week. I must have made friends out there, since I noticed a LinkedIn invite in my inbox the morning after the Google Dance (I drink a lot so my autopilot is somewhat developed by this point).

I rolled into the office this morning, and I noticed another LinkedIn invite in Thunderbird. I clicked through from the link in the email and this is what I saw:

Facts:

• my name isn’t Jon,
• I know for a fact that I’m a major LinkedIn n00blar, and
• this account has like seven bazillion contacts associated with it

There’s no way this is my account. What’s more, the page clearly states: “you are not the intended recipient of this email”. It’s nice that they let me know, but why did I receive it in the first place? Beyond a doubt, I was logged into some guy’s LinkedIn account. I could have sent horse porn to all of his contacts (assuming I happened to have some lying around, which I didn’t, *ahem*). I could have ruined his life if I was so inclined. The implications are truly frightening. An entire network of professional contacts stood teetering, like a house of cards. Fortunately, I’m not that much of a douchebag, so I snapped a quick screenshot and closed Firefox.

So what happened? Discounting any server-side problems that might have caused this, maybe the URL I clicked was not a complete URL. Long URLs sometimes break in most email clients, so maybe whatever truncated version I clicked on ended up being a link to someone else’s account. If this is what happened, this is disturbing to contemplate. Someone smarter than me could play around with the URL parameters and probably gain access to all kinds of stuff in this fashion.

I’m likely to dismiss this as a possibility. LinkedIn probably obfuscates those URLs in some manner. I mean, everyone uses LinkedIn. They wouldn’t use it if it was fraught with security issues, right?

Then again, when one applies that kind of logic to things like Microsoft-built operating systems, that whole argument disintegrates like diarrhea in a chemical toilet.

I don’t feel like it’s LinkedIn’s fault. Yeah, something went wrong, but it is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone. If anything is to blame it is the nature of the internet itself.

There is an inherent fault in the way people view web-based applications these days. Caught up in the exuberance of “Web 2.0″, people sometimes talk about moving “beyond the desktop”. As if someday everything that we do with computers will happen independently of our own client machines. All of our data will be stored remotely on servers, and catalogued according to various folksonomies.

This vision of the future fails to take into account the intrinsically vulnerable state of any node in the www. Any site can be hacked. It is largely a question of how much time and expertise available to the hacker. Often those who assert the contrary, that a particular site is “hacker safe“, are somewhat disingenuous, to put it mildly.

Google would do well to consider the inherent vulnerability of all data on the Web, as several Google products, including Gmail, have been hacked in the past. When a web-based application is compromised, accountability becomes vague. Especially in the case of Google, whose employees are divided into a number of teams which often don’t have sufficient clearance to pass information between one another. Sure, they might have a flawless internal process for dealing with this kind of thing, but to an outsider visiting the ‘Plex, Google’s methods can appear bureaucratic and protocol-heavy at best, obfuscatory at worst (on the positive side, they do make a terrific tofu scramble with extra green onion).

In general, any attempts to divorce a user experience from the concept of the “desktop” are misguided. If anything we should be fortifying, streamlining and improving the desktop environment. Thankfully, this is already happening (download Xubuntu 7.04 for a scintillating example).

I don’t mean to propose we all become e-hermits either. I still plan on using LinkedIn, and I would recommend it to other people too. Simply put: don’t believe the hype, and don’t put sensitive information somewhere where you cannot personally oversee its physical security.

Play safe, kids.

Just when you thought the day’s news couldn’t get any more ridiculous, New Haven, Connecticut comes through with the whopper of the day.

A couple members of the Hash House Harriers - “A drinking club with a running problem” - were charged with first-degree breach of peace, which is a felony.

Their crime? Siblings Daniel and Dorothee Salchow used flour to mark the trail for the group’s other runners for that day’s jog and party. The flour was used because it’s noticable and biodegradable.
Read the rest of this entry »

Owen Wilson was brought to the hospital today via ambulance. It is unknown at this time why exactly, but he has already released a statement regarding this incident, stating:

“I respectfully ask that the media allow me to receive care and heal in private during this difficult time,” the 38-year-old actor said in a statement released through publicist Ina Treciokas.Via Yahoo! News

Naturally the news is abuzz with this event. It is this author’s opinion that there will be a great deal of journalists who will not do as he requests and simply allow him privacy during this time - and I don’t just mean the obviously opportunistic tabloid types. There are already a great deal of articles running that he “reportedly tried to commit suicide”. The real questions are, how can they so casually include this hearsay, and how much worse will it get before the end of the day?

This internet rag, known as the National Ledger, has already gone so far as to claim knowledge of “a slit wrist and ingestion of a bottle of pills”; this bit being written just before a complete breakdown of his astrological chart. There were also no sources cited for their claim. Splendid detective work, National Ledger, now get back to your charts and your remarkable slew of banner ads.

Give me a break, people. The guy went to the hospital. It happens to thousands, for various reasons. I sincerely hope that this base speculation is as far as the majority of the media goes into prying into his not-very-private-right-now life. Good luck to you, Owen Wilson, in what may be a difficult time. I for one wish you swift and peaceful healing.