Coraline in 3D

I went to see the latest movie based on a Neil Gaiman book, Coraline, this past weekend. It was in 3D! And not at all like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets throwing popcorn at you, either, it was really 3D! This was a really cool use stop-animation and old camera techniques to really bring the audience into the movie, without any of the silly gimmicks like throwing ... well, popcorn at you.  I did find I had to sit very still when the movie first started, to avoid getting queasy at the perceived motion.  After the intro, though, the motion seemed to slow down - avoiding the problem that the latest Bond film had for me, so I could actually focus and look at what was going on. The protaganist was a smart young woman, played by Dakota Fanning, that was so reminiscient of my niece. :-)

The fact that this was done with real object, vs computer animation, brought a certain quaint realism to the characters, endearing them to all of us.  I can't imagine all the knitting work that must've gone on!

I am a huge Gaiman fan, and while I haven't read this particular book, the story definitely had his traditional mark of slightly creepy, intriguing and delightful on it.

To truly appreciate this film, you do need to go see it in the theaters in 3D. I'm sure that's why they filmed it this way (and why we saw so many previews for more movies coming in 3D). It's a good way to get butts in the seats instead of people waiting to see the film on DVD.

Shoreline Amphitheater saves seats for residents

I went this Sunday to the Shoreline Amphitheater to buy tickets for an upcoming Coldplay concert, as I hate paying the "convenience" fees to the online ticket retailer. I like to go to the box office on Sundays, because Shoreline waives their own convenience fee, too.  There's no way to get out of the stupid parking fee (charged per ticket, regardless of if you drive to the amphitheater or not). All the same, I said "Two tickets for Coldplay" and the attendant said "Only lawn left". Fine. Then I heard a man at the next window telling the customer that they may as well set up his Mountain View Residency card while he was there.  That triggered an old memory of when Shoreline used to do presale for residents, a program I thought had expired, since it is no longer mentioned on their website.  When I asked my cashier about it, she said, yes, Shoreline still does that & presale is for every show - two days in advance of regular sale at the box office or online. Thinking it was too late to do anything about the Coldplay show that had already been on sale for two weeks, while I was there I might as well set up my residency for the next concert. With just my driver's license and car registration, she did it right then & there, then informed me that there were still some reserved seats left for Mountain View residents.

I guess these were the leftovers from the presale that had not yet sold! She told me that they continue to hold them for residents until the show date gets closer. Very cool!  Of course, I don't actually have the tickets, as they have implemented a new procedure to prevent scalping where they only give you a voucher instead of tickets.  I'll need to pick them up day of show, which is a nuisance, but as I dislike scalpers, I guess it's worth it.

Psychology of a con

One of the biggest security weak spots in all systems is the user.  Yes, there are many complicated processes for attacking networks and cracking password files, but why bother with that when you can simply ask an inside user for their network credentials?  I'm just getting caught up on email so have just read Bruce Schneier's December cryptogram which highlighted a great article by Paul J Zak called How To Run a Con. While this article is specific to traditional con men and their marks, this same logic can be applied to how easy it is to social engineer data out of so many users. We want to trust people, and most of all, we want to be trusted, too. Interesting reading!

What happened to book stores? And why the smell?

My family and I are celebrating a belated Christmas, so I went to the Westfield Valley Fair Shopping Center - a giant mall in Santa Clara/San Jose - to hit the sales.  Some of the kids I'm buying for are really into Abercrombie & Fitch (to quote my college roomates, "MUST BE TRENDY!!!!"), so my husband and I took a stroll through there. We were nearly overcome with the blaring loud music and the overwhelming scent of cologne.  Now don't get me wrong, I like loud music - I worked in two different music stores for a total of about 6 years in the industry. I just don't like it so loud that I literally can't hear my husband shopping next to me, nor the cashier behind the register.  And the smell - it was so over powering! Who would wear so much cologne?!?

Well, off for the next person on our list, we started looking for the book store. Was it Borders? Hrm... where was it again? Unable to find the book store where it used to be, we checked the store directory. No book store. None.  Giant mall and no readers. That's depressing.  Well, more reason to spend money in downtown Mountain View, where we have at least three book stores.

Arriving home, I discovered another disturbing thing about Abercrombie.  All of the items purchased from the store reeked of their cologne. They obvsiously spray the garments in the store in order to encourage people to buy their cologne, too. Now my house smells like Abercrombie. Note to self: don't ever shop their for anyone who has allergies!

On a completely unrelated note, why do the producers of American Idol insist on showing people suffer through miserable auditions, and hardly show any of the people going through to Hollywood?  As someone who has auditioned a lot, and knows when I've had a bad audition, I certainly wouldn't want it televised!

Miss you already

Rest in peace my dearest grandmother, just a few weeks shy of her 90th birthday. Her contagious laughter and  unending desire to have a good time (and to tell you how to do it) will never be forgotten.  Also, to my beloved uncle, who passed away just 45 minutes before his own mother in different parts of the country. You will both be missed terribly.

encrypt command will suddenly no longer be annoying!

Thanks to a fix from Dina Nimeh's latest push of changeset 27f403fbf8ca, the next OpenSolaris release will now prompt you twice for the passphrase it uses to generate the key to encrypt your data with. This is a long overdue change, one that I can't believe we didn't do sooner. The way we implemented it before, it was too easy to lose your data if you made a mistake the first time you put in your passphrase. Yay!

Rough Cut of Solaris Security book published!

I'm about to become a published author! Okay, currently I'm just credited as "Sun Microsystems Security Engineers", but it is a step in the right direction.  Our organization found that a lot of papers and books out there on Solaris security were out of date, just plain wrong or missing coverage of cool features, so we thought what better way of setting the record straight then writing our own book?

Management got behind this, and many of the members from our organization set to writing an outline for the book and for each chapter and found an interested publisher.  Next came the hard part - writing the actual chapters! Okay, it wasn't that hard, because we all wrote about the technology areas we know and love, but we had to make tough calls on what to leave out and make sure we didn't miss any critical information.  Once we got all of our drafts together, Sharon Veach edited our work and wrote the introduction for the book, Solaris Security Essentials. The book is on Safari right now for review before we publish - please leave comments on the Safari site so nothing gets lost. The external link only shows excerpts, so if you are internal to Sun, please create a login using your Sun email address and look at the Sun Internal link.

I worked with Jan Pechanec and Darren Moffat on the Solaris Cryptographic Framework chapter, which is all based on Solaris 10 Update 4.  We leveraged work from my previous white paper and an updated paper by Wolfgang Ley. Some chapters appear to be missing still, but I'm sure they'll appear on the site over the next few days.

During this process I was told I use too many exclamation points in my writing, which (apparently) makes readers tired. How strange is that?