Steganography

Steganography is the science of hiding messages. Steganography is from the Greek for “covered writing”. The idea is that you can hide a file (or message) in an image. Images such as bitmaps and gif store the values for each pixel in a series of 3 bytes (where the first byte is for red, the second byte is for green, and the third byte is for blue). If you use the lower bit of the 3 bytes to store the bits of your hidden file, the image will still appear to be the same as the original image. An example of this can be found at http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/books/mos2/zebras.html (the web site for the book “Computer Networks” by Andrew S. Tanenbaum). In the Tanenbaum example he has a 1024X768 pixel bitmap that contains a compressed file of five complete works of William Shakespeare. (BTW “Computer Networks” is an excellent book and is the primary book that is used in the CSCIE-131b course that I am taking.)

This technique can also be used to watermark images and can also be used on music and video files (just imagine what you could store in a 1GB video file).

(There is no hidden file in this image)

Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite

If you haven’t seen this yet, you should check it out.

Brought to you by YouTube.

Brett’s Corner

I have added the “Brett’s Corner” to the right hand side of my blog. The "Great" Brett McNealy requested a place on my blog to post his pictures. The first picture is a picture of me done in ASCII art. Brett’s hobbies include putting coworker’s faces on different bodies, so I expect that some of Brett’s pictures may get a little crazy.

Model-View-Controller Song

I borrowed the book Head First Design Patterns from a coworker. I wanted to read the section on Model-View-Controller. In the book there are the words to the “Model-View-Controller Song” (you can also listen to the mp3 from their website). The song is a little cheesy but I do like geek songs.

Ctrl+Mouse Wheel

I just found this one yesterday. Being that I just love finding shortcuts and hotkeys I wanted to share this one. If you hold down the Ctrl key and use the mouse wheel you can change the font size in IE. This also works in Outlook. Also this will zoom in and out inside of Word and Excel. I am not sure how often I will use this but it is cool.

FedEx

My brother ruined FedEx for me.




If you look at the white space between the E and the X you will see an arrow. Now every time I see a FedEx truck or a FedEx label, all I see is that crazy arrow.




I wonder if FedEx did this on purpose. Is it some kind of subliminal message?

Shipping in the Technology Age

I think there is a lot that we can do to make the internet buying experience better. Why can’t companies tell you how long it will take to deliver your online order? I ordered iPod’s for my brothers this past Christmas from www.apple.com. I ordered them on Saturday and paid the extra $20 for the 2-3 day FedEx delivery thinking that I would receive them before I left on Thursday. (I should have known that 2-3 day delivery would really mean a 6-7 day delivery). I didn’t receive an email from apple until Tuesday telling me that they had sent the iPod’s and after checking the FedEx web site, I noticed that it was being sent from China. I quickly realized that I would not receive it until after I left. Why couldn’t apple tell me that my 2-3 days delivery would not actually be shipped for another 2 business days? We need to get to the point where companies can tell us exactly how long it will take to fill and deliver our orders. I was even willing to pay the extra money for the delivery. Online buying is all about delivering products. If you are in a hurry to receive it and pay the extra money to get it they should tell you how long it will take. I don’t think that it was FedEx’s fault. The problem was that apple didn’t tell me how long it was going to take for them to fill the order. This is a problem that most of not all online companies have. I realize that this can be a tricky thing, especially when quantities run out and things go on back order, but if I was willing to wait I would not have paid the extra money.