Blind Spot, a short film by Matt Nayman and I, has been accepted to a number of festivals to screen in the near future!

So far it will be screening on:

• October 22nd in Austin, TX at the Austin Film Festival
• October 25th in Toronto, ON at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (which I will be attending)
• At some point from November 3 to November 20 in Leeds, UK at the Leeds International Film Festival

After the film's premier I will finally be able to publicly show the film (I will post it here) and make long overdue updates to my VFX demo reel. [edit: no longer the case]

You can watch the film on its website!

I recently watched a TED talk by Ralph Langner, lead of one of the teams attempting to reverse engineer the virus to determine its purpose. My original reaction on Twitter was:

#Stuxnet sent prerecorded status data to the engineers to hide how unhappy the centrifuges really were. Via #TED talk http://t.co/UjNu2yuG

@mikeboers on Sep 26, 2011. Visit on Twitter.

The most terrifying part about this attack is that while it was highly targeted, all of the exploits and actions it took are remarkably generic and can easily be retargeted to many other types of systems. There are many targets, and they are very vulnerable. The community of engineers and developers working with these sorts of control systems have, up to this point, not felt the need for a level of security paranoia that many software systems presently require.

There is some good discussion in the comments on Reddit:

Stuxnet: The world's most powerful worm

Linked by news_and_coffee on Sep 26, 2011. Visit on Reddit/r/TrueReddit.

I recently discovered a charming web service called RoboHash which returns an image of a robot deterministically as a function of some input text. Take a gander at a smattering of random robots:

These would make an awesome fallback as an avatar for those without a Gravatar set up, since it will always give you the same robot if you enter the same email address. So of course I implemented it for this site!

Read the full post...

I have finally figured out a way to process my raw Canon XF100 video files into Apple ProRes. I'm not satisfied with Final Cut Pro's log-and-transfer function, because that seems to require the footage to be transfered directly from the camera/card. I want to hold on to the original MXF files and be able to process them at my leisure.

This depends on using both ffmpeg, and qt_export.

Read the full post...

I have pushed a lot of changes to my website in the last week.

• All of the source code driving this site is now available on GitHub under the BSD license.
• All of the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
• I can now render gorgeous math courtesy of MathJax:

\[ J_\alpha(x) = \sum_{m=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^m}{m! \, \Gamma(m + \alpha + 1)}{\left({\frac{x}{2}}\right)}^{2 m + \alpha} \]

Hopefully that doesn't look like a jumble of backslashes. *crosses his fingers*

I have finally pushed out the start of my new website. While not everything works quite yet, and some of the formatting has been lost in the transition from Posterous, it is at least good enough for me to start using it.

Things which still need work include:

• formatting of old content Done(ish).
• better styling of general typography Done.
• automatically pull in other services (eg. Flickr, Reddit, etc.) Done.
• better separation between these blog posts and other services (eg. Twitter)
• preparing the source for publishing (eg. remove secret keys) Done; see GitHub.
• tags on blog posts
• deal with timezones, as my dev machine and server are different Done.

And a whole bunch more!