Lock, Load, Code.

Today I came across a video that was very interesting, but also very alarming. On Adobe Creative Cloud's Youtube channel, they demonstrated the ability to basically Photoshop your voice. In the demonstration, they had a voice sample. The program translated the sample into words. The user was then able to edit the string, creating a new sentence. When the voice sample was played back, it was nearly indistinguishable from the original sample. Not only was the presenter able to manipulate the original sample, but he was able to create entirely new content that sounded just like the originally speaker. In the presentation, the issue of malicious intent was immediately addressed. They claimed that voice samples would be "watermarked", so that the manipulated sample could be distinguished from the original sample. Skeptics and conspiracy theorists such as myself are quick to disregard the presenter's claim. After all, companies have been persuaded or forced to handover ...

While browsing through some Ted Talks, one in particular that caught my eye was Jinha Lee's presentation on new technology that expands virtual reality beyond what we've seen so far. After the 90s experiments with virtual reality, the world was somewhat burnt out on the idea of being able to see and interact with computer generated characters and landscapes. There were many working demonstrations made of how feasible the idea was, but they were far from real-world applications. At some point, people started rolling their eyes at the mention of this once exciting technology.  As time went on, the power of a computer grew according to Moore's law. We were able to create more detailed video games that could sometimes be mistaken for real environments and physics. Humanity began to revisit previously dismissed ideas spawned by science fiction. From this was born the Oculus Rift. With the Oculus Rift, virtual reality was no longer something seen just in MIT labs, working only ...

SQL scripts are sets of commands saved into a file. In the beginning of my SQL class, we had to run some scripts to create a guitar shop database. This is just one example of a script you can create in SQL. When working with views recently, I found out how to automatically generate a script to print the results of the view. If there’s a set of SQL commands you find yourself running several times, what does a programmer do? Automate it! A stored procedure is pretty similar. It’s a set of commands stored with a certain name, that can then be shared with applications. This isn’t just a script that someone can run, but instead a script that is stored in a form that can be accessed by applications. The key thing to this is that is allows access to the data to be controlled. Data may be entered or changed, but the procedure itself cannot be altered. If there’s a database that might have to keep track of IPs visiting the site, it can call on a stored procedure to automatically do this. The ...