Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Recently, Microsoft released a utility called Microsoft Private Folder 1.0, which allows (actually, allowed) Windows users to encrypt and password protect a folder to keep its contents away from prying eyes, much the same way Mac users have been able to store data via encrypted disk images for some time now. According to this article from CNET News, Microsoft has withdrawn this utility because of the complaints of IT managers and staff. Those persons responsible for the smooth operation of the network and the integrity of data contained on machines connected to it were worried about the possibility of lost data in a private folder for which the user has forgotten the password, or the storage of malicious or otherwise inappropriate data in a format where the IT people responsible cannot access it, and therefore prevent it from harming the network and connected devices. I would also imagine that, in many circumstances, such encryption of company or personal data on a company machine violates the network and computer usage policies that employees agree to when they are hired.

Some users have accused IT personnel of asking Microsoft to retract Private Folder because, in so many words, it reduces the IT person’s ability to “spy” on users. As an IT person, I can assure you this is not the case. When important data disappears into a private folder, and the password is forgotten by the user, that user will expect the IT person to know how to recover it, which the IT person cannot do. Then management will ask why important data was lost in such a way, and why that application was allowed to be used to begin with, and, because of the manager’s lack of understanding about how encryption works, why the IT person can’t recover it. The user may, in some circumstances, take some of the blame, but experience tells me that IT people will take the brunt of it because it’s considered their responsibility to control the network and the devices connected to it. The buck stops at your IT person’s desk.

That being said, there seems to be a couple of options for making Private Folder acceptable to users, IT personnel, and management:

1. Add the ability for IT personnel to set a flag in Active Directory that disallows the use of Private Folder. This ensures that everyone is treated equally, and that Private Folder cannot be the cause of data loss.
2. If Private Folder is allowed by AD, enable the admin to set a master password for all Private Folders created by AD clients, such as Mac OS X does for encrypted home folders. That way, when a user forgets the password, data can be recovered using the admin password, and re-encrypted in another folder, should the user choose to do so.

These two ideas would work for Private Folder, but the fact is that other freeware applications with similar functionality exist, and have existed for some time, so there is no true safeguard against encrypted data loss. The issue was brought to the forefront in the past several days, however, because Microsoft released such a utility, and that means users are more likely to try it.

Way back when I first started using the Internet (way, way back), everything was text-based. I dialed into a phone bank connected to a mux, which then opened a telnet session to a Sun server where I had an account. AIM and Yahoo didn’t exist; you used talk, ntalk, or ytalk to chat with your friends around the country, and you used finger @domain to find out if they were online. Java chat clients didn’t exist either. Instead, IRC was the way to participate in large-group chat chaos and file sharing.

IRC doesn’t seem to be as popular today as it was more than a decade ago, but IRC software has certainly progressed far beyond the text-based clients on the old Sun server. My friends at Your Mac Life have an IRC chat each week (irc.netmug.org, #yourmaclife), and because I enjoy participating, I have the need for an OS X IRC app. Most people seem to know about Snak, but I never wanted to try it because a single-user license is $29. Not that I’m dismissing Snak! If it suits your needs, then by all means, register and enjoy.

There is a very good free IRC app, however, that I almost never hear anything about, and that’s Colloquy. I like Colloquy a whole lot. It very much has the look and feel of an OS X app, and it’s featured enough to keep me happy. Rather than write a dry review of the software, I’d rather post some screenshots of the app in action and the preference panels. I dunno about you, but sometimes the preference panels are as revealing about an app’s function as anything a reviewer would write. At the very least, it should be enough to whet the appetite of anyone who uses IRC. Colloquy is a free download, so if the screenshots appeal to you, it costs nothing to try it.

Here’s an out-of-context capture from this week’s YML chat:

And here are the preference panels:

This article summarizes a study which concludes that persons aged 18-25 who are distracted by a hands-free cell phone while driving have the reaction time of a 70-year-old driver. Presumably, the problem is worse with handheld cell phones and people older than 25.

This article summarizes a study which concludes that persons driving while talking on a cell phone are as impaired as persons driving while intoxicated.

People driving while talking on a cell phones have the reaction times of elderly drivers.
People driving while talking on a cell phones are as dangerous as drunk drivers.
Therefore, elderly people are as dangerous as drunk drivers.

When will the elderly be taken off America’s roads?

I was really surprised that my old picture of grandpa asleep against the fence got any kind of reaction. I honestly didn’t expect strangers to care much about an old picture of someone they don’t know. But I’ve had a lot of comments about it on the blog and off. So I went through my iPhoto library and picked out some other pictures of grandpa sleeping (or maybe almost sleeping) in different places. There are more pictures, but they’re not in my possession and I don’t have them scanned.

Long ago, I talked about using an Apple iSight camera to take pictures through a telescope. I promised some pictures and a sort of how-to. And then I told everyone to wait. And wait some more. And then, finally, Tim and I actually found an evening with clear weather where we could get away from the city and test out the camera and take some pictures, so I could write about the experience. Just as I was about to write everything down, I became seriously ill, so I was out of action for a week or so. But now… now I’m going to write about it! After months of waiting, you’re finally going to have the opportunity to read the most semi-climactic of all possible outcomes in this mildly interesting project.

The goal, for those of you who can’t remember that far back, was to couple an iSight camera to our telescope and see what happened. We tried a preliminary run and got a video of Saturn, which I was able to make into a semi-decent still image. The fly in all of this ointment was that the camera had to be held still to get a decent picture, and neither Tim nor I (or probably any person for that matter) can hold it steady enough. So we decided to build a mount.

Mounting the iSight to an eyepiece is simpler than you might think, assuming you have the kinds of eyepieces we do. I took some pictures because describing the mount without the pictures would probably be pointless.

The parts:

Clockwise from the top left, the black thing is our 8mm eyepiece with the rubber eye cup removed, exposing a convenient indented edge which nylon screws can grip. Next to that is the iSight camera. Below the camera is the inner aluminum cylinder which houses the iSight, with nylon screws to hold the camera steady. The other aluminum cylinder goes on the outside of the first, as you’ll see shortly in another shot. Tim machined both of these cylinders and the screw holes to fit both the iSight and the eyepiece. Finally, there’s a rubber ring to prevent the iSight from slipping into the barrel, again, illustrated in pictures just below.

Here’s a step-by-step illustration of how these parts fit together:

And here’s the finished product mounted on the scope:

And the scope, plugged into my PowerBook, running Starry Night Pro, ready for action:

The mount worked very well. The camera was held as still as we could expect. The problem we ran into was the software. To make a long explanation short, we needed to focus both the telescope and the camera, and after that, we had to adjust the camera’s settings so that details from Jupiter, made bright by the telescope’s 12-inch aperture, wouldn’t be washed out in the resulting image. The only software I could find that would allow me to control the iSight in that way was Quicktime Broadcaster, and frankly, it’s not great for astronomy. QTB is intended for what I assume most people would call normal shots, in a room, of maybe a person or a scene, not of tiny planets through a telescope. That being said and understood, QTB’s preview window is too small, and it’s hard to see whether the object you’re viewing, in this case, Jupiter, is in focus, and what level of detail is available. Also, the interface for controlling the camera’s settings is idiosyncratic and frustrating until you get the hang of it. The only way to tell if we were in focus was to take movie after movie, and then guess whether we should tweak it anymore or just leave it.

With some patience, Tim and I managed to get a decent movie of Jupiter, ready for processing by Keith’s Image Stacker into a sharp still:

It was a long way to go, and admittedly Tim and I were climbing a bit of a learning curve, but the iSight turns out to be fairly good for planetary imaging. If there were a better piece of software other than QTB available, the task probably would have been 1/2 as hard.

Having done about as well as we could with planets, we decided to turn the camera towards some relatively bright deep sky objects. M13 is a giant globular cluster that looks great to the eye, but didn’t even register on the iSight. M57, the Ring Nebula, didn’t show either. Neither of these no-shows is surprising - the iSight is intended to photograph humans in a lit room, not faint fuzzies of the night sky.

Our next target is the moon. It’s large and bright with a lot of little details and seems like it would be the perfect object for an iSight-equipped telescope.

Smile Tim!