Journalists obtaining phone data

Interesting article on a phone “hacking” scandal. From what I can tell this was a case of widespread insider attacks and no “hacking” was involved.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/21/phone-hacking-operation-motorman-files

Intersting quotes:

Research by the lobbyists Big Brother Watch shows that between 2007 and 2010, 904 police officers and staff across Britain were subject to internal disciplinary offences for breaches of the Data Protection Act, which governs access to personal information. Of these cases, only 98 led to the dismissal of the person involved.

….

The offences include incidents where staff accessed sensitive information with the intent of passing it to third parties, as well as staff browsing material for personal interest. The records include 137 gross violations, defined as “serious breach of contractual terms … which makes any further working relationship and trust impossible”. Only 27 staff lost their jobs.

SOUPS 2011

I’m blogging SOUPS 2011 over on the CUPS blog.

http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/blog/?cat=20

MySQL generate mysql create command

MySQL can automatically output the command necessary to create a duplicate table. Very useful for copying tables between servers or for doing small modifications between two tables.


SHOW CREATE table table_name;

Adding \smiley to latex

\usepackage{wasysym}

Adds \smiley and \frownie along with a bunch of other commands to your latex document.

SMI Experiment Center 360 download link

Link to download Experiment Center and Begaze from SMI. http://www.smivision.com/en/gaze-and-eye-tracking-systems/support/software-download.html

Translating SMI BeGaze error messages

I’m just starting to work with SMI BeGaze and have already run into some non-intuitive messages and problems that took some figuring out. The following is a continuously updated blog post of different confusion points I’ve had and the eventual solution:

This version of BeGase only allows 2 gaze data files per experiment

Translation: You put in the wrong license usb dongle.

If you use the Experiment Center dongle the BeGaze software thinks it is in some sort of evaluation mode and will only allow you to work with a small amount of data. You have to use the correct license key.

Audio not playing or not visible when you know it is there

You know you recorded audio but for some reason BeGaze doesn’t show the audio track and when you play back the video it doesn’t play any audio.

Solution: If you hide the webcam video on the left sidebar the audio also vanishes. To get audio back just expand the “Webcam” tab on the left sidebar. Note that hiding this box makes BeGaze process data a bit faster.

BeGaze does this because the audio isn’t associated with the screen recording, its associated with the webcam file. When you tell BeGaze to hide the webcam it hides the audio as well.