Lunar Eclipse

I took some pictures of the lunar eclipse back in February, and I'm just now posting them to flickr. I'm kinda new to this digital photography thing.

That was the night of the spaghetti dinner and silent auction at my kids' school, which Gail and other members of the school council spent weeks organizing. During the evening, I was talking to the father of one of Ryan's friends, and he mentioned the eclipse that was happening that night. I had no knowledge of this at all, so I was glad he told me. When we got home and I got the boys to bed, I grabbed the camera and tripod and set it up in the kitchen. We also have a little trigger thing that attaches to the camera so you can take a picture without touching the camera itself — I figured this was a good idea since I turned the flash off, so the exposure time might be longer, and if I was holding the camera it would be shaky. I centered the camera on the moon, zoomed in as far as I could (200mm lens), and took a couple. With the tripod, the camera already centered on the moon, and the trigger, I was all set. All I had to do was go into the kitchen every five minutes or so, hit the trigger, and that's it.

Five minutes after I took the first picture, I went back into the kitchen and looked through the viewfinder, just to make sure I was still centered on the moon. I wasn't, so I re-centered and took another picture.

Five minutes after that, I did the same thing, found that, again, I was not centered, so I re-centered and took another one. I figured that I must have bumped the camera or tripod without noticing, so I was extra careful this time.

Another five minutes passed, and I went to take another picture. Sure enough, the camera was no longer centered. I scratched my head and re-adjusted again and then it hit me like a ton of bricks.

The moon moves.

I had to re-adjust the camera and tripod before every picture, of course, and eventually the moon got high enough in the sky that I was getting reflections off of the kitchen windows, so I moved the tripod out to the deck. Luckily there were only patches of snow at the time, so I could go outside in my socks every few minutes without getting wet. As we moved towards totality, the exposure time kept increasing; between 9:32 and 9:55, exposure time went from 0.4 seconds to 4 seconds, and by 10:18 it was at 15 seconds. At 10:52 it was still 13 seconds, but at 11:15, it was back down to 2.

There are nicer and clearer pictures of the eclipse out there, but I'm pretty happy with mine. Here is a very cool video made up of a series of excellent pictures of the eclipse, though this guy is a much better photographer than I am, since he managed to keep the moon centered the whole time. Maybe the moon doesn't move where he is.

Stewart in, Johnson out

The Blue Jays released Reed Johnson today, in favour of Shannon Stewart in left field. I don't get this move. Johnson's numbers overall look very similar to Stewart's — Stewart has a higher career batting average (though Johnson hit .320 in 2006, which is higher than Stewart has ever hit), but the power numbers are the same. Stewart was faster in his prime, but hasn't stolen more than 7 bases since 2002. Stewart is a decent fielder but can't throw, while Johnson is a much better fielder who can play more than just left. And Johnson is almost three years younger.

But Stewart makes way less than Johnson — which is weird, considering the Jays signed Johnson to a one-year contract less than three months ago. Once again, the almighty dollar makes decisions that should be left to baseball people.

Who's the Gretzky of baseball?

There was a conversation on the radio the other day saying that we are lucky to have lived in a time where we've seen some of the best athletes in their prime — Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Roger Federer are or were all far and away the best players in their respective sports in their primes, and are frequently mentioned as possibly the greatest players in their sports of all time. I don't follow football so I can't comment on that, but it made me wonder who that player would be in baseball.

Warning: lots of sports stats to follow. A lot of people hate baseball because of all the stats, but that's one of the reasons I love baseball.

Babe Ruth his 60 home runs in 1927, a record that was not broken until 1961. The second-highest total that year was 47, third was 30. Only three teams in baseball had totals higher than 60. He had over 130 RBIs ten times, including seven years in a row. His career batting average is .342, and slugging is an amazing .690. Oh, and as a pitcher he even won 20 games twice. Ruth arguably falls into this category (though amazingly, he only won the MVP award once)... but that was 70 years ago.

I don't think there's been one single baseball player since then that has dominated his sport to the same extent as Ruth, Gretzky, or Jordan. First of all, it's basically impossible to compare pitchers with non-pitchers — was Roger Clemens in his prime more important to his team than Alex Rodriguez in his? — so we'll have to come up with two.

For hitters, you'd have to say that ARod is the best player playing right now, and probably for most of the last 10 years. But think of how much better Wayne Gretzky was in his prime than the second best NHL player at the time, or how much better Tiger is than the second best golfer around today, and then think about the second best MLB player, whoever that is (Ichiro? Ordonez? Tejada?) — is Rodriguez that much better than second place? Not to the same extent. Think of previous best hitters in the game: Boggs, Brett, Rose, Williams, Mantle, Molitor, Sosa, McGwire, Bonds. Were they significantly better than second place at any time, and if so, was it for several consecutive years like Gretzky or Jordan? No. Also, most of these players were very good at some things and not so much at others. Some like Sosa and Bonds could hit for a high average and with some power, but Rose and Boggs were pure hitters who didn't hit the home runs. For a player to be comparable to a Gretzky, he'd have to hit .375 with 50 HRs, 50 stolen bases, and a Gold Glove every year for ten years. Some players have two or even three of these, but rarely all four at the same time, and when they do it's for a season or two and then they fall off.

How about pitchers? There are certainly a few candidates here. I would argue that Roger Clemens is the best pitcher of the past 20 years — he won back-to-back Cy Young's in '86 and '87 and then did it again 11 years later. He won another in between those two sets and he's won twice more since. But he wasn't the most dominant pitcher in the game the entire time. Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson each won the Cy Young four years in a row, and Maddux has won at least 13 games in each of the last twenty seasons. But he's only won 20 twice. Both Maddux and Johnson have been very good for a long time, but not head and shoulders above everyone else. It could be argued that Eric Gagné was far and away the best reliever in the game from 2002 to 2004, but missed most of the next two seasons because of injury and was just "pretty good" with Boston last year.

As much as I dislike him, Barry Bonds would have to be the best baseball candidate. He won 7 MVP awards including four in a row, he hit almost .300 for his career (including over .320 four years in a row), has the single-season and career records for home runs, led the league in walks many times, and was a legitimate base-stealer for the first half of his career. He's the only player with both 400 career home runs and 400 career stolen bases — in fact, he's got over 500 of each. And he won eight Gold Gloves in nine years in the 1990's. However, he never won a World Series, and even when he was winning all those MVP awards, only once was he the unanimous choice. And of course, there are the allegations that he was juiced for the last six years.

I wonder what it is about baseball that it hasn't produced any single player that is head and shoulders above the rest in 70 years?

Thanks to Wikipedia for all the stats.

From the "No Kidding" department

R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe announced this week that he is gay.

In other news, Adolph Hitler was not a very nice man, and George W. Bush is not the most popular President in U.S. history.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times for Leaf fans. This is the time of year we both love and hate. It seems that every year between the trade deadline (sometimes shortly before) and the end of the season, the Leafs go on a hot streak, thereby giving their fans some hope that maybe they will sneak into the playoffs and as Edmonton showed us a couple of years ago, once you're in the playoffs anything can happen. As I said, sometimes it happens before the trading deadline, thereby "forcing" the Leafs management to make some silly last-minute deal, usually trading away kids and draft choices for some veteran way past his prime. I've written about this a couple of times before.

Aside: I was at the Leafs game last Saturday night, and they had a "top 10" list on the Jumbotron during a commercial break. This was the top 10 scorers in NHL history who spent time as a Toronto Maple Leaf. This included long-time Leafs like Sundin and Gilmour, but also the likes of Leetch, Housley, Nieuwendyk, Francis, and Larry Murphy, all of whom spent very little time in Toronto. At least 6 of the 10 spent two seasons or less as a Leaf, mostly near the end of their careers (though Vincent Damphousse did his Leaf time at the beginning of his career (sob)), and these are all players with 15+ year careers.

Anyway, since February 16, the Leafs are 9-5, winning 5 of 6 at one point in there. They're beating some pretty good teams too — taking two from the Flyers, destroying the Bruins 8-2, and also beating the Capitals and Senators. They're playing pretty good hockey these days, so we have to ask, as we do every year about this time, "Where was this two months ago, when we were still in the playoff hunt?"

Of course, it would be great for the Leafs to go on a huge winning streak and make the playoffs and continue that momentum into the second and maybe third round, but it just ain't likely. If that can't happen, then it would be great, though less so, for them to completely tank and lose all of their remaining games, giving themselves a better draft pick and a chance to pick up Steve Stamkos. If they can suck all of next year too and pick up John Tavares (no, not the lacrosse player, his nephew the hockey player), that would be even better.

But that's not that likely either. I have heard people actually suggesting that the Leafs should try to lose most of their remaining games, but come on. You just can't expect professional athletes to try to lose. No, what will probably happen is the same as in the previous couple of years: the Leafs will do pretty well for the remainder of the season and miss the playoffs by that much. Or they'll just make the playoffs and get slaughtered in the first round. Either way, they get a low draft pick. Such is life in Leaf Nation.

Usability

Memo to the people who wrote the DLink router HTTP server: when adding to the list of MAC addresses that are allowed to use the router, I should not have to reboot the router after every single one, especially when the option for MAC filtering is OFF. I should be able to add each computer that currently has a DHCP-assigned IP address to the list and then reboot the router once when I'm finished. This was a job that should have taken under a minute, but due to this little bit of stupidity, dragged out to over ten.

Security through obscurity

Computer security is strongest when everyone knows how it works. This seems on first blush to be counterintuitive — if you're sending some information to another computer or storing it in a file and you want to encrypt it, wouldn't it be better if nobody knew anything about your encryption algorithm? If it's secret and nobody knows how it works, they can't break it, right? Well, this is true, for the most part, but there's a big problem with this so-called "security through obscurity" — once someone does figure out how it works, your secret is out and you've lost at least some (and usually most) of the security that it provides. On the other hand, if your algorithm is freely available and fully documented (i.e. TLS, HTTPS, AES), then the open source community can look it over and find any vulnerabilities in it. If thousands of hackers know exactly how an algorithm works and can still pound on it for years and not break it, that's a good indication that it's pretty strong.

This was demonstrated recently with some Adobe products after the release of TrueCrypt 5.0 full disk encryption software. TrueCrypt rewrites the first sector of your disk with its own software, so that it can ask you for your encryption phrase before the operating system boots. Some users have found that after they did this, their Adobe Dreamweaver installation, which worked perfectly until then, suddenly decided that it was no longer licensed. This is certainly inconvenient, but if they relicensed their Dreamweaver software and rebooted their machine, the machine would refuse to boot, which is beyond inconvenient. TrueCrypt forces users to create a recovery CD before it encrypts the disk, which is lucky since this is the only way to recover from this.

It turns out that Adobe is saving some of their licensing information on the first sector of the disk, which is not accessible through normal channels (i.e. you can search your C: drive to your heart's content and you will never find their licensing data). I'm sure their developers thought this was quite the clever little solution — since nobody could find this information, nobody could modify it, thereby making their software more difficult to pirate. Rather than simply encrypting the licensing information with a secure algorithm, they chose security through obscurity. Now that their secret has been revealed, everyone knows where they store their license information, and so they've completely lost the security that this provided. If they had simply used something like an AES-encrypted file, their licensing scheme would only broken if the AES algorithm itself was broken, which is rather unlikely.

However, adding an encrypted file introduces a key management issue — where do you store the encryption key that unlocks the license file? If it's hard-coded, you're back to security through obscurity — if someone figures out where in the executable the key is stored and posts that information on the internet, your entire security scheme is useless. The solution to this problem is non-trivial, and so I'll leave that up to the software manufacturers. They may decide that a hard-coded key is fine, or maybe using a random key and storing the bytes of the random key mixed in with the encrypted data itself (in a reversible way) is good enough for their purposes. Storing encrypted data along with its encryption key is inherently insecure — like keeping your bank card PIN on a Post-It note attached to your bank card — but it's only licensing information we're talking about here, not the US nuclear launch codes or a file containing credit card numbers or something.

Bottom line: if any part of your security system uses the phrase "Nobody'd ever think of looking here!" or "Nobody will ever figure out how we did this!", it's not secure.

What a drag it is getting old

The storm hit with a vengeance on Saturday. In the morning it wasn't too bad, so I took Nicky to his skating lesson and Gail took Ryan grocery shopping. All of us were home by 11:00, and Gail and I didn't leave the house again. The boys went out to play after lunch, but both were back inside within 15 minutes and then they stayed inside the rest of the day as well. It snowed and snowed and snowed, and by Sunday morning, we had more than a foot of new snow — luckily it was the light fluffy stuff, not the heavy wet stuff. I went out Sunday morning to shovel it, and spend an hour doing the sidewalk, front walkway, and half the driveway. I was too tired to do the other half, so I left it for later. An hour after coming in, I had to take a couple of Tylenol because my back was sore. It was sore again this morning so I took another two. I never went back out to do the rest of the driveway yesterday, so I had to do it this morning so I could get out (though I did as little as possible to allow me to manoeuvre the car out of the garage). Tonight, I'm feeling particularly old — my back is still sore as is my right shoulder (which frequently hurts during shovelling as well), and my legs are kind of stiff too.

I've managed to avoid buying a snow blower in previous years, using various excuses: it's too late in the season to justify doing it now, or I should have bought it in the spring when prices are lower, or I can just borrow my neighbour's (who's very generous with his), or the ol' "back in my day" excuse — I'm young and in relatively good shape so I should suck it up and do it by hand. In addition to those, I simply have no place to put a snow blower. In the winter we keep both vehicles in the garage, and there is no room in there for a snow blower. The only alternative is to leave the car in the driveway so we can store the snow blower in the garage. But then every morning I'd have to brush and/or scrape it and then get into a cold car, and in the past I've decided that the convenience of not having to do that outweighs the convenience of having the snow blower. Keeping the car outside in the winter is also likely to reduce the life of the car, whether through engine damage or rust.

As I get older, however, I'm finding that a snow blower is no longer merely a convenience, it's becoming a necessary tool to avoid killing myself shovelling snow. In the past when the snow was particularly heavy, I've borrowed my neighbour's. I feel a little guilty every time I do because he's spent the big bucks to buy this thing and I'm benefiting from it, but boy, does it make the job easier. There have also been times where I have come home from work to find my driveway has been done for me (sometimes by my neighbour, sometimes by persons unknown), and I'm very grateful, but I feel a little bad that I cannot return the favour. Next year, though, I think I will have to bite the bullet, buy myself a snow blower, and leave the car outside for the winter. I will have to be gentle when I break the news to it.

Oh, gotta go. Matlock's on.

The Winter from Hell

It's come to this — blogging about the weather.

A front-page article in the Spectator the other day had the headline "'Winter from hell' far from over, folks". That morning we got 15 cm of snow, and today (Friday) and tomorrow we're supposed to get another 10-30 cm. We've already gotten more snow than we did all of last winter, I've worked at home because of weather more times this year than any other year (there were a couple of weeks in early February where I worked at home for about 8 out of 10 consecutive days), the potholes on the roads are brutal, and the four of us decided this morning that we've all had quite enough of winter, thankyouverymuch.

This year more than any other year I can remember, I have wondered to myself "Why do I still live in the cold, snowy, slushy Great White North? Why have I not moved to Vancouver or Florida or California or Hawaii or someplace warm?" The standard answer is that southern Ontario is where I've lived pretty much all my life (other than 4 months in Seattle and a year and a half in Ottawa). Most of my friends and family are here, and it'd be hard to make it to Rock, Leafs, and Blue Jays games if I lived anywhere else. I suppose the short answer is that I love southern Ontario... except for the winters.

I've been to Vancouver, and I loved it. It's a beautiful city. Moving there would have the advantage of staying in Canada, but the winters are much nicer than here. It would also have the advantage of being close to the mountains — not only are they beautiful, but you could pick a spring day where it's 15 degrees at home, drive for two hours and go skiing. I have friends in San Jose as well, and moving there would give us a zillion opportunities for tech jobs (not that we don't have that here). However, both of those cities are very expensive, and to get a house the size of ours in either of those places (that's not 100 miles away from the city) would be a million dollars, and <checking wallet> I don't have a million dollars.

So I guess we'll just hang out here and complain about the winters until we retire, at which point we can spend our winters in Florida with thousands of other Canadian retirees. Maybe once the kids are in university Gail and I can winter in Florida and telecommute — Sybase might build me a GraemeAnywhere! (Note that the picture of IvanAnywhere in that article is old — here's a newer one. If you look down the hall in that picture, you'll see the top of a doorway on the left. My office is two doors down from that one.) (Update: IvanAnywhere has his own page on sybase.com now!)

Anyone else notice the irony in the phrase "winter from hell"?

Movie review: Beowulf

Beowulf is thought to be the oldest story written in the English language. Given that, the fact that the latest movie version uses the latest in computer graphics technology is a little ironic. For the most part, the graphics are truly amazing; in a number of scenes, I had to work to convince myself that it actually was computer graphics and not a live action movie. Other scenes were not much better animation-wise than Shrek, but I guess that's what happens on the bleeding edge of technology.

I read somewhere about some controversy regarding the rating of this movie. It was rated PG-13, and people thought it should have been higher because of Angelina Jolie's character being essentially nude through all of her scenes. The weird thing is that the movie deserved a higher rating because of the violence and gore — it didn't much matter about the nudity. Blood splattering everywhere, arms and heads being severed, people being impaled on spears and other objects, someone's head being bitten off and chewed up, someone being ripped in half, monsters being stabbed in the eyeballs, someone ripping the heart out of a dragon with his bare hands... and people think kids shouldn't watch this movie because of Angelina Jolie's boobs?

I've never really been a big fan of Jolie — I haven't seen all of her work, but she's a decent actress, and is certainly attractive, but I've never found her to be as amazingly beautiful as others make her out to be. In this movie, however, well, all I can say is wow. The animators made her character look exactly like her (thanks to the skin-tight motion capture suit they had the actors wear), and in the world of sexy animated women, she makes Jessica Rabbit look like Ernest Borgnine.

<shakes head> Sorry. Back to the movie. Note: Some spoilers follow.

At the beginning, the Beowulf character is the ultimate hero — strong, fearless, and confident almost to the point of arrogance. The Grendel monster has the entire town in panic, and he dispatches the monster with relative ease. Quite honestly, I thought it was too easy. The whole thing about Beowulf being naked when he did this was a little silly though, as was the clever "camera" work to avoid showing his stuff on camera; that reminded me of Austin Powers and seemed out of place in a supposed action-adventure movie. Then he met Grendel's mother (Jolie), who turned him from a hero into a fraud and a liar in no time flat. It seemed to me that the character we saw at the beginning who fought all of those huge monsters should have been strong enough to resist her temptation (though she would have been pretty damned tempting... <shakes head> Sorry.), but he seemed to cave pretty quickly. And what was in it for her? Was Beowulf a good enough roll in the hay that she agreed to leave the town alone for 20 years?

Anyway, aside from the gore, it was a pretty good film. Much better than another movie we saw recently, Michael Clayton, which was billed as "a different kind of thriller". Sure, one that wasn't in any way thrilling. There's two hours of my life I'm not getting back.

Microblogging

I don't get twitter. If you've never heard ot it, twitter has been described as a "micro-blog". Basically, you join up and then you can post things, just like with a blog. But each thing you post (called a "tweet", I kid you not) can be no longer than 140 characters, and can't contain pictures or videos or stuff like that. You can add people to your friends list and then when you log in, you'll see what they've posted and people can subscribe to your feed as well. You can update your twitter from your cell phone as well, so you can keep the world up-to-date on everything from anywhere.

This seems to me like overkill. In particular circumstances, I can see it being useful or interesting — say your favourite IT journalist is attending MacWorld or some similar conference, and is "twittering" about some things he's seeing. A full-blown blog entry about each thing would take too long, so if he updates his twitter every few minutes or half an hour or whatever, that's kind of neat. Similarly, a TSN reporter wrote a blog on NHL trade deadline day. He was at home watching the TSN coverage, and wrote one article and kept updating it every few minutes, whether to talk about a new trade or rumour, or analyze a previous trade, or to comment on something someone said, or just to joke about an announcer's tie. Dave Barry has been known to "live-blog" during episodes of 24. Those kind of things lend themselves to twitter rather nicely.

But I'm guessing that the vast majority of twitter users are posting what they're having for dinner and what they're watching on TV and "just finished working out, now I'm going to have a shower" or other pointless crap like that. The stuff I write here is mostly my opinions or observations on stuff, not just what's happening in my day-to-day life, because I figure nobody would be interested in that. With twitter, you can have an hour-by-hour or even minute-by-minute account of someone's day, and I just don't see the point. I already waste enough time online working on my blog, facebook, or wikipedia, so I really don't need to add twitter to that list.

Why Shaquille or LeBron could become Raptors

Take a look at the Raptors lineup. Not a lot of typical North American names on there: Bargnani, Nesterovic, Calderon, Garbajosa, Brezec, Kapono, Delfino. Moon and Baston are not too bad, but with first names like Jamario and Maceo, they fit in as well. Even Darrick Martin's first name is spelled weird. This must have been why Fred Jones was traded, and I guess even Juan Dixon wasn't "ethnic" enough.

The only players left are Chris Bosh, T.J. Ford, Anthony Parker, Kris Humphries, and Joey Graham. Look for one of these guys to be traded to Indiana for Ike Diogu, or maybe to Chicago for Andres Nocioni and Thabo Sefolosha. The rule for the Raptors: If we can't pronounce your name, we want you on our team.

February Quotes

I saw this on another blog somewhere, and thought it was a neat idea. Once a month, I will post a list of interesting quotes I've heard over the previous month. They could be lines from songs or movies or TV shows or anything else. In my case, they're mostly songs because I listen to a lot of music. The quotes I selected were chosen mainly because they were intruiging or clever or funny, not because they represent my thoughts or feelings at any particular time.

"We're only immortal for a limited time"

Rush, Dreamline

"I'm in a groove now, or is it a rut?"

Rush, Face Up

"What people don't realize is they're between 10 and 150 milliseconds away from every creep on the planet"

PaulDotCom Security Weekly

"Well I've been looking' for a job but it's hard to find
Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line"

Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City

"Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said
'Son, take a good look around. This is your hometown'"

Bruce Springsteen, My Hometown

"If you wonder why I never wrote you a song
it's because happiness writes white"

Harvey Danger, Happiness Writes White

"I remember what she said to me
how she swore that it never would end
I remember how she held me oh so tight
wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then"

Bob Seger, Against the Wind

"I was flyin' back from Lubbock, I saw Jesus on the plane
Or maybe it was Elvis, y'know they kinda look the same"

Don Henley, If Dirt Were Dollars

"She just looked at me, uncomprehendingly,
like cows at a passing train"

Don Henley, If Dirt Were Dollars

"A man with a briefcase can steal more money
than any man with a gun"

Don Henley, Gimme What You Got

"Who's the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?"

Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Star Wars"

Leia: "Why you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerfherder!"
Han: "Who's scruffy-looking?"

Han Solo and Princess Leia, "The Empire Strikes Back"

Leia: "I happen to like nice men."
Han: "I'm nice men."

Han Solo and Princess Leia, "The Empire Strikes Back"

"When he speaks nobody listens, where he leads no one will go"

Genesis, Man on the Corner

"I swear you might have left me anyway
So I'll leave you instead"

Big Wreck, Under the Lighthouse

"Two men say they're Jesus
One of them must be wrong"

Dire Straits, Industrial Disease

"It is [for] a 5th round draft pick... It was either that or a bucket of pucks, but Florida didn't want to give up a whole bucket."

My friend Steve, talking about the Leafs trading Wade Belak to Florida

"You gave me nothin', now it's all I got"

U2, One

"Am I buggin' you? Don't mean to bug ya. OK Edge, play the blues."

U2, Silver and Gold (live)

"Don't believe in what they tell me, there ain't no cure
The rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor"

U2, God Part II

"You've got to cry without weeping, talk without speaking,
Scream without raising your voice"

U2, Running To Stand Still