Monthly Archives: December 2006

Flame Thrower

Posted by imolloy on December 24, 2006 – 10:57 pm
Filed under Uncategorized

My sister, brother-in-law, aunt and uncle bought my mother a creme-brulee kit for Christmas. It didn’t work as planned. For those who can play 3GPP video, check this out.

I don’t think purdue has their mime settings set correctly, so you’ll have to download the video and view it manually. (Quicktime plays 3GPP videos, or send them to any (decent) cell phone).

Kids, don’t try this at home.

PVC Speakers

Posted by imolloy on December 19, 2006 – 1:37 pm
Filed under Uncategorized

When I sold off my ‘86 RX-7, I pulled the stereo equipment I added. There wasn’t much: a CD Player that was later put into the Neon, and now sits on my pantry shelf since the Sable has the ridiculous Ford Oval, a subwoofer I got from my sister which is probably rotting in my parent’s basement, and a pair of 4″ and 6 1/2″ Infinity speakers.

After seeing these speakers on Gizmodo I decided to eventually try to build my own. It’s next to impossible to find 6″ PVC pipe anywhere, so I couldn’t make a 4″ tweeter and 6 1/2″ woofer version of Flow like I wanted, but was able to make a ”Back to Basics” pair using only my 4″ speakers. I didn’t really need to use both, since they’re not component speakers, and have a little silk tweeter in the center, but the point was more to look cool than anything else.\

They don’t sound good enough to replace my Paradigm fronts (still haven’t completed the set), but they’ll be good enough for an office or kitchen set.

At the moment they’re stuffed with dirty socks (they provide more acoustic dampening than clean socks) and I’m still experimenting on the height. The longer tube provides more base and is a good mix for my Orbital and Massive Attack, but lighter music, like Iron & Wine it muddies. And I’m not the only DIY PVC Speaker builder out there. When searching online for help designing these I ran across this guy in Canada.

I’m Published

Posted by imolloy on December 16, 2006 – 1:29 pm
Filed under Conferences, Research

On December 11th, I received my first acceptance (and my second rejection). Ninghui Li, Jiangtao Li and I submitted the paper “Dynamic Virtual Credit Card Numbers” to the Eleventh Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference to be held in Lowlands, Scarborough, Trinidad/Tobago, February 12-15. Yes, yes, I know, it’s going to be hard going to Tobago in February but I’ll be strong. I’m a survivor.

Several people I met at CCS mentioned they too had submitted papers to FC’07, so it will be interesting to see if they’ll be there. That will make things easier, and I’m sure each conference the idle chat and hobnobbing comes more naturally as you begin to make friends with research around the world who work in similar areas.

For those who are interested, here’s the abstract for the paper:
Abstract: Theft of stored credit card information is an increasing threat to e-commerce. We propose a dynamic virtual credit card number scheme that reduces the damage caused by stolen credit card numbers. A user can use an existing credit card account to generate multiple virtual credit card numbers that are either usable for a single transaction or are tied with a particular merchant. We call the scheme dynamic because the virtual credit card numbers can be generated without online contact with the credit card issuers. These numbers can be processed without changing any of the infrastructure currently in place; the only changes will be at the end points, namely, the card users and the card issuers. We analyze the security requirements for dynamic virtual credit card numbers, discuss the design space, propose a scheme using HMAC, and prove its security under the assumption that HMAC is a PRF.

Computer Science Makes [almost] Everything Possible!

Posted by imolloy on December 11, 2006 – 3:23 pm
Filed under Computers

Apparently, there was a poster contest for K-12 students in the area to create a poster with the theme “Computer Science Makes Everything Possible.” Cute theme for a Computer Science Department to come up with, assuming you didn’t talk to anyone in theory about undecidable problems, anyone in crypto about perfect secrecy, perfectly hiding / binding commitments, etc.

I really wanted to rant about computers not being able to make people artists, poets, playwrights, composers, musicians, or anything else Microsoft seems to suggest in their ads (and Apple in their bundled apps) before I realized this was K-12 only.
For those interested, here’s the Winning Poster.

My computer graphics background and high-school probably don’t make me the most impartial judge of digital artwork and the abilities of the common user to use these tools. By grade 10 I was playing with everything from Photoshop (several years experience by that point), Director (now dead), Illustrator and Freehand (also dead), to ElectricImage, SoftImage, and Alias|Wavefront PowerAnimator (now Maya).

I guess the real kicker is that if this piece was done traditionally (sans computer science) then I’m sure the student would have masked her images (cut them out) with a pair of simple (analog) scissors (without using a mouse), and then used some (chemically engineered) glue to paste (adhere) the image to the page.