Ben Harper

If you have not yet heard of and experienced Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, then you must RUN not walk to the nearest CD shop or computer and immediately introduce yourself to him. Start with anything from the album named "The Will to Live" and live from there.

And no sooner were the words out of his mouth...

...he has to eat them again.

Ladies and gentlemen: A smart analyst.

ANALYSTS

I've heard it said that that market analysts are to PR what black holes are to matter - they continually suck up all PR within their gravity well, the end result of which is an ultra-dense "event horizon" of hype from which no facts emerge.

It sounds like JWZ, or one of his commenters.

Follow up to brain-scan based HCI

The head- and eye-controlled cursor is very cool, and gets rid of the most damaging half of the keyboard/mouse pair. (via NS). It's software that is usable now, and even might make me go out and buy a webcam to test it out.

My only improvement would be to use left- and right- wink for left- and right-click, instead of using the equivalent of double-left-and-right click to mean click. And it will do 3D soon! Fantastic.

(To answer the "silliness" charge levelled in the NS article by the analyst, I do not care one bit about looking silly if it saves me torturing myself with the mouse, and people look stupid talking with headsets, or with headphones, so...)

Previous posts in this area: Questions, Answers, Concepts

Update: Having tried the software, I have to admit it's not there yet. I'm sure we'll get there eventually. (Also: try playing with moving your hand in front of your face...)

I hate printers.

• They are always hungry.
• When they aren't hungry, they're ill-tempered.
• They eat TREES.

Photocopiers are something that Apple should have done - just once - to show everyone else how to get the interface right.

Question:

How many cities do you have to lose control of before declaring a state of civil war?

• Fallujah
• Sadr City
• Najaf
• Ramadi
• Samarrah

Anyone? Anyone? Rumsfeld?

Your password is too short...

This is a random password generator that I stuck in my CryptUtils file. It's reasonable for website logins, etc.

private static final String VOWELS = "aeiou";

private static final String CONSONANTS = "bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz";



private static transient SecureRandom random;



static {

   try {

       random = SecureRandom.getInstance("SHA1PRNG");

   } catch(NoSuchAlgorithmException nsae) {

       //... static logging here.

   }

}



public static final String newPassword(int length) {



   if(random == null) {

           throw new RuntimeException("PRNG not initialised!");

   }



   if(length < 8) length = 8;



   length -= 3;



   char[] blabla = new char[length];



   for(int i = 0; i < blabla.length; i+= 2) {

       if(i >= blabla.length) break;

       blabla[i] = CONSONANTS.charAt(random.nextInt(CONSONANTS.length()));

   }



   for(int i = 1; i < blabla.length; i+= 2) {

       if(i >= blabla.length) break;

       blabla[i] = VOWELS.charAt(random.nextInt(VOWELS.length()));

   }



   String result = new String(blabla);



   if(result.indexOf("eni") != -1) {

           return newPassword(length+3);

   }



   return result + Integer.toString(random.nextInt(999));

}