Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Gavle Goat is Getting Ready to Burn!

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The Telegraph reports that the Gavle Goat for 2012 is up, and surrounded by guards, cameras, flame retardants, and arsonists.

Emergent Chaos has reporters on the ground internet, ready to report on this holiday story of a town, a goat, and an international conspiracy of drunken arsonists. Stay tuned!

This years goat is shown in its pre-fire state. Note the pre-positioned fire extinguishers surrounding it, along with what one might describe as an altogether insufficient fence.
Gavle Goat 2012

[Update: It turns out that the goat is blogging this year. Mixed English and Swedish.]

Now Available: Control Alt Hack!

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Amazon now has copies of Control Alt Hack, the card game that I helped Tammy Denning and Yoshi Kohno create. Complimentary copies for academics and those who won copies at Blackhat are en route.

Control-alt-hack.jpg

From the website:

Control-Alt-Hack™ is a tabletop card game about white hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games (Munchkin and GURPS).

Age: 14+ years
Players: 3-6
Game Time: Approximately 1 hour

You and your fellow players work for Hackers, Inc.: a small, elite computer security company of ethical (a.k.a., white hat) hackers who perform security audits and provide consultation services. Their motto? “You Pay Us to Hack You.”

Your job is centered around Missions – tasks that require you to apply your hacker skills (and a bit of luck) in order to succeed. Use your Social Engineering and Network Ninja skills to break the Pacific Northwest’s power grid, or apply a bit of Hardware Hacking and Software Wizardry to convert your robotic vacuum cleaner into an interactive pet toy…no two jobs are the same. So pick up the dice, and get hacking!

Bleg: Canon & Apple RAW processing

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I’m having a camera issue that’s become more and more noticeable with recent software changes. The raw previews coming out of the camera appear substantially more exposed than when Aperture is finished processing them. The difference is hard to measure (there’s no easy undo for raw processing), but appears to be about a full stop of light, sometimes more. I often use a quick shoot-adjust-shoot loop that gives me the exposure I want, and Aperture is messing with the result.

The intuitively obvious search terms (aperture, raw processing, exposure) are not getting me very far in understanding what Aperture does to process the raw images, how I might alter the defaults (well, there’s adjustments pane>RAW fine tuning, but that offers up only boost, huge boost, sharpening & edge adjustments, Moire, Radius and De-noise. Those don’t seem to be incredibly relevant to the brightness of the image.)

Does anyone have advice for how to get the RAW images to process differently?

Test post

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Over the summer, Adam and I were talking and I said that I’d like a place to do some personal blogging as opposed to things I normally do, which are targeted at one place or another.

I’d like to be able to blither about security, but also about whatever. Photography, cooking, you know, things that most people who blog blog about.

We set this up and I have finally gotten around to making a test post.

So thank you, Adam and the rest of the jazz combo. I’m Jon Callas, and I’m on bari sax and english horn.