Jeremey's Weblog

Nokia 9500

I'm writing this from a Nokia 9500 Communicator that showed up for some work I need to do. Pretty interesting toy. I can't decide if I love it or hate it.

UPDATE: of course I had to fix the post in ecto b/c the 9500 uses Opera and Opera is really lame. I'm thinking more and more that I hate it. :)

Yamaha M7CL + Aviom Monitors

Well, wow. We installed the new Yamaha M7CL console and the Aviom monitor system last week, and they are just flat-out amazing. The console is a brilliant live console, it gives you lots of power, lots of routing control, great effects, and gets out of your way. The most surprising change after installing the new board is the quality of the sound. It is unquestionably superior to the Ramsa DA-7 (Panasonic) we had before. Huge, noticeable difference. I very much doubt that it's simply the move to 48kHz (from 44.1). The preamps have gotta be better, along with the D/A conversion in general.

Before I blab on ad nauseum about the console, a few words about Aviom monitors: run, don't walk, to the store, and buy them. Pay extra for them. Send them money for no reason! Avioms work like this: you send up to 16 separate channels of audio through one cat5 cable to the stage, and then you either chain the individual monitor units (w/ cat5) or you have a distributor. The distributor puts power on the cat5, so each unit doesn't need its own wall wart. But best of all, each monitor unit allows each user to mix their own monitor mix... they can individually control volume and pan (or stereo image width, for stereo sends) for each of the up to 16 channels.

More after the link...

Eisley Live in Stafford, TX

So I got a photo pass to shoot the Eisley show here in Stafford (just outside Houston) on Monday night (thanks, Boyd!). I shot 317 images... boiled that down to 137, and then ended up with 44 or so "produced" images. Here they are:

http://homepage.mac.com/jeremeybarrett/eisley-stafford/

Some images are presented in both color and B&W because I found them interesting in both.

Gabriel Portrait

A test shot while working on getting all my lighting happy... came out pretty well (except for the off-the-cuff composition).

iChat Encryption, Part Deux

So I did a little analysis of an encrypted iChat session (tcpdump is your friend). Looks to me like they're doing a public key encrypt on each message. More specifically, I think they're encrypting a random session key for each message, and then encrypting the message with the session key, using a block cipher having large-ish blocks, so I suspect it's AES. That would be both the logical, good choice and would fit my guess based on message size differences. There's a momentary lag when sending each message, which would also support the notion that they're public-key encrypting each message in some way (that and the message size and the presence of certificate-like text). Interesting stuff.

iChat Encryption

It seems that Mac OS 10.4.3 has encrypted chat support for .Mac users using iChat. That's very cool... I'd love to know the details. I'd really love it if it was an iChat feature, rather than a .Mac feature, though. I use .Mac, but not everyone I want to talk to does, but alot of them use iChat. But hey, it's a start. There is some method to that madness, though, because it appears that the .Mac servers are in charge of issuing certs to "certified" .Mac users. Only .Mac knows that information. But it would be cool to have the option to encrypt-but-not-authenticate iChat sessions with any other iChat user.

Anyway, good show Apple... but give us options for encrypted chat with non-.Mac users, por favor. We'll suffer through the unauthenticatedness.

Revenge of the Sith

Well I went and paid my homage to George Lucas again... I bought Episode III on DVD. Mostly in vain hope of seeing Jar Jar Binks sucked out an airlock in one of the deleted scenes. Sigh.