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At MacWorld San Francisco, you can hear about Aperture from one of the guys who designed it!

I’ll be in Vancouver all next week for USENIX Security. No, I don’t have a paper or a demo; the first Electronic Voting Technology workshop is contiguous and co-located, so my advisor and I are attending the whole week. The ACCURATE group will also be getting together to share ideas and WIP.

Of course, you gentle readers won’t really notice, since my writing here has been so erratic and sparse of late. Even E has been better about updating over the last few weeks.

I don’t think I’ll bring a proper camera (as my advisor will most certainly have his vastly superior photographic equipment on hand), but I’ll have my phone, so you may see some photos appear over here from time to time.

I’ll leave you with this excellent little exchange from last night, as Glenn and I discuss the prospect of catching a midnight screening of The Wrath of Khan at the Drafthouse.

Prof. Luis von Ahn’s Google TechTalk, 7/26/06, on harnessing the computational power of humans.

There’s a new toastycode product out today: Cuckoo brings customizable hourly chimes to your Mac. Mac OS X supports speaking the time on the hour using text-to-speech, but there’s no way to just play a simple sound on the hour. Cuckoo will play your choice of sound on the hour, or at any five-minute mark (:05, :10, etc.). You can decrease the volume of the chime relative to your other system sounds, allowing a little subtlety (should you want it).

Basic usage (an hourly chime from the built-in sound set) is free; advanced features cost a measly $6. As usual, please send in your suggestions and bug reports.

Naturally, I am conflicted about about The Prestige (for which there is now a trailer for your viewing enjoyment). On the one hand, the cast and director simply cannot be beat. On the other hand, does this mean there won’t be any interest in a film version of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell?

You may have noticed that we had a cute kitten living in our parking area.

Well, no more. She’s moved in with our cool neighbors!

NYT: Out of College, but Now Living in Urban Dorms.

This month, Ms. Cook is moving in. The woman on the phone, Karen Falcon (not a mass murderer), calls the building “a dorm for adults.” It is a community of the overeducated and underpaid.

There is nothing new about having roommates in New York City. What Ms. Falcon has invented is a full-service dorm, full of strangers she has brought together to share big apartments as a way to keep housing costs down. Her approach is a homegrown response to the soaring rents bedeviling desirable cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

How is this different from a 19th-century London boarding house?