strangely entangled

Well that was a bit of a hiatus, wasn’t it?  I guess that’s what happens when you have twin toddlers, a small business, and move across the country.

Anyhow, I’m back and plan to update the blog a little more often.

Like any true geek, I got my hands on a copy of Star Trek 2009 as soon as it became available. Because I don’t have a BluRay player yet, we opted for the iTunes download. The download also included an Extras bundle, with some interviews, deleted scenes and graphics (nowhere near as much extra content as what’s included on the BluRay discs I hear).

I also read over on Ars Technica that the iTunes version included “hidden content”, accessible with a secret password. Well getting the password prompt was easy enough – on the main Trek extras screen there are a series of blue blocks across the top, above the Enterprise. On the far right is a single green control. Click it, and a password prompt pops up… but what was the password?

Turns out that was easy enough to discover. iTunes Extras are simply HTML, CSS and Javascript files. So poking around in my iTunes Library folder, I was able to find the code. Grep is your friend.

Grepping for “code” in the Extras folder returned a couple promising hits, including one line mentioning “egg” as in Easter Egg. From there, I was able to narrow it down to the controllers/home.js file. The password can be found on line 46 of that file.

If you aren’t a command line type of person, I’ll spoil it for you here: n42C02c942

Enjoy your new Romulan user interface!

I like to keep my eye on the Kitchener-Waterloo area (in Ontario, Canada for you non-Canadians), for a number of reasons:

• I studied / lived there for a number of years
• the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is located there
• the large number of high-tech companies in the area

Although Ottawa tried to claim that it was “Silicon Valley North” in the late 90s & early 2000s, it always felt as though the really cool stuff was going on in KW. Looks as though that trend has continued – KW is home to one of Canada’s newest hacker spaces, the Kwartzlab (pronounced quartz-lab).

Back in the 90s I read about l0pht and used to think that KW was the perfect environment to set up something similar, given the large # of factory lofts available in the cities, and the technical prowess of a large percentage of the population. Looks like Kwartzlab has a nice setup too – nearly 1600 sq. ft of hacker space goodness. From the looks of their Youtube channel, there are some interesting projects underway.

Will definitely have to drop in the next time I visit KW.