More Proof That I Am Actually A White Person

More Proof That I Am Actually A White Person

That headline will be massively funny to those who were up ’til all hours Sunday night at World Fantasy. For the rest of you:

Have you seen the video where the store employees show that the Face Tracking software on HP’s computers don’t track black faces? If you haven’t, go look now, it is really funny. When I saw that I wanted to test if it was true for other HP webcams, so I pulled a system from our testing lab and tried it out. The Face Tracker easily tracked me, but it also tracked a darker-skinned co-worker. I then turned the backlight correction off (which made the picture darker and more like the video linked above). The Face Tracker could no longer track my co-worker, but could still track me.

So forget the pencil test, the brown bag test, and the one-drop rule. Technology has given us a far better way to determine who is black in these times, and it is the Face Tracking algorithm in HP MediaCenters!

Aren’t you glad we live in the future? I am.

*facepalm*

Click here to see the video evidence of my shame.

Messing With Linux

Messing With Linux

Have I mentioned lately how my job is so great?  It is so great.  Please don’t ever stop being awesome, job.  Same goes for the people I work with.

This week I’ve been trying out different flavors of Linux in order that I might write a review of them for a print issue.  At first I was thinking of installing them all on laptops we have lying around, but then while researching another story (about how to live without an optical drive) I discovered the beauty of booting and installing from USB thumb drives.  So now I’ve been trying to put all 5 distros on different keys to see if I can run them like that.

As I type this, I am running Ubuntu.  No wonder people are all excited about this thing.  Damn, it’s pretty awesome.  Also, I am more than thrilled that I can take this USB key and stick it in another computer and have the same OS and programs and settings because it’s all stored on the drive.  Score!

Still having some issues with the others: Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mint and Fedora.  Stupid complicated systems!  Make it easy!