I’ve unfortunately not been involved in any quantum entanglement accidents recently — teaching duties are mostly to be blamed for my two-week silence.  Besides spending at least a whole work-day every week on our Data Visualisation practical, I’ve been lecturing and also been preparing a new lecture block on information visualisation with a dash of visual data analysis.  Due to my not secretly being an infovis expert, this latter activity has taken up quite a chunk of my time and effort.  On the other hand, the exercise has forced me to acquire a significant amount of new infovis brain juice which I’ll probably soon be applying to impressive effect.

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Dear readers,

Due to a small accident with a friend’s quantum entanglement device, I briefly got stuck in a high pressure reality vortex. The headaches have subsided, but I do still seem to be suffering from slight time compression artifacts. In any case, that’s why there’s only this one edition of the Weekly Head Voices to cover weeks 43 to 45. As is always the case, please make use of the bolded phrases to guide you through this post. In other words, the fat words tell you what you you might find interesting so that you can skip the rest.

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Today The Next Web posted an episode of BBC Watchdog where it was demonstrated how a GMail account was hacked through insecure (WEP) WiFi.

For those of you still wondering, I’d like to confirm that it is indeed possible to hack a GMail account over insecure WiFi: GMail does indeed always send your password through secure HTTP (SSL) so that this can’t be directly hacked, BUT, by default, the rest of your session happens through normal clear-text HTTP.  The Watchdog episode of course gives absolutely no technical details, but it’s most probably the “sidejacking” attack first published by Robert Graham, where the attacker reads the cookies of the post-authentication HTTP traffic and uses them to fool GMail into thinking that they are in fact the legitimate owners attacked GMail account.  This attack works on other webmail and -service providers too.

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On Wednesday evening I was putting the finishing touches on probably the most important presentation I’ve given in the past few years.  As I was testing everything on my trusty little netbook just before bed-time, two scary problems reared their ugly heads: 1) An embedded MS-MPEG4 encoded AVI simply showed a black box when played and, perhaps even more disheartening, 2) the last and most important slide took between 4 and 6 seconds to appear.

So I went to IEEE VisWeek 2009, and it was far more awesome and enjoyable than even my most optimistic expectations. Besides contributing to the tweetstorm (see #visweek) but not being able to liveblog due to higher priority activities, attending paper presentations and chatting with as many cool people as possible (much higher priority activities), this year I’ve also made a number of elaborate bets with a subset of said cool people concerning the future of our technology. If all goes according to plan, the bets’ll end up being visionary, if not, they might be slightly embarrassing and we’ll have a good laugh at VisWeek 2019.

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I know that I said that I’d excuse myself from writing one or two editions of the Weekly Head Voices due to the upcoming VisWeek 2009 (and 2010, yes I will be blogging from the future) and the live-blogging explosion it will most likely lead to, but I somehow couldn’t stay away from my beloved WordPress installation. Oh well, so be it!

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Week 40 of 2009 brought with it the following noteworthy tidbits:

Gadgets:

Public opinion concerning the HTC Hero is generally quite positive, although the extent to which the most recent firmware update has remedied the often-reported laggy touch-screen response leaves me suspicious:

It does have a capacitative touch screen (the best kind), but is apparently still not as responsive as the iphone.  It’s almost as if the finger swiping is seen as a suggestion instead of an actual command.  Now before all you fanboys go “I told you so”, please remember that Android devices actually multi-task an arbitrary number of processes, whilst Apple has determined that fanboys are only allowed one at a time, with some recent small exceptions. I think I might just wait this one out. At least until next week.

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It’s been a terribly quiet week blog-wise, but I did make that promise four weeks ago, and, seeing that I want to be a columnist when I grow up (hint hint employers of columnists) and those guys and girls simply HAVE to think up something interesting every single week, I too am going to do my best to add sweetness to the shortness that you see before you.

Speaking of shortness, I did get some off-blog (yes, face-to-face!) feedback on the previous edition of the WHV. Said (highly appreciated) feedback concerned the length of these posts, more specifically, that there was too much of it. It’s important to remember that I in fact do write these things with the chronically time-challenged in mind. One of the measures I take is to bold the most important themes in each paragraph, so that one can easily skip on to the next paragraph if the mentioned theme does not take one’s fancy. This week, I’m going even further by employing section headings! As always, please feel free to skip paragraphs and sections.

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Howwwwdy-hoooo!

Depending on the particular reality that you find yourself in, which itself could be a function of how hard you’ve been partying, we have now left week #38 of 2009 behind us.  I took a significant part of this week off to spend some quality time with visiting family.  On Tuesday, I popped by my work (that’s the TU Delft for the uninitiated) to pick up some stuff for my planned official visit to MeVis in Bremen on Wednesday.  Two noteworthy points spring to mind:

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HI KIDS!!

You thought I’d forgotten all about you, dintcha?  Nope, not that easily.

Because this edition of the Weekly Head Voices is the most unorganised ever, the trick of bolding the most representative words in each paragraph simply won’t fly.  So instead I’ll just highlight some random words, and you can pretend that they actually mean something.  Think of it as a post-modernistic exercise in missing the point.  I’ll try and be more organised next week.

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