As I said a couple of days ago, I am speaking again in Cairo in a few weeks at the EDC. I have arrived on the topics that I am presenting. While these are still subject to change it looks like:
I am really looking forward to seeing all my friends and again want to thank Waleed Abdelwahab for pushing me to revive this blog.
See you all soon!
Every few years I find that there are pieces (sometimes big ones) that I have not played with or encounted on a customer project and it tends to freak me out a bit. We have now arrived at that point in the cycle yet again! Expression, SilverLight, WPF and the like are all technologies that you will likely never see me present upon, but in the aftermath of MIX 08 and whole WideOpen Web movement I just have to dive in deeper and see what the implications are for the parts of the technology that I do use daily.
I think this is a key survival trait for me and I encourage everyone to reach down into that free time (you are still sleeping right?) and get a grip. The good news is that great blogs and podcasts are making this much easier then ten years ago. I promise to report what I find here and might even ask a non-rhetorical question or two 
I have finally confirmed the final dates for the Egypt Developers Conference which is held every year in Cairo. This year it is in Mid April and again I will be speaking. I really look forward to this event and for a short time I was afraid that the dates would move to a week where I couldn’t attend, but I now know that this is not the case.
This week I have to solidify which sessions I will present and am thinking about doing a session on commercial software development (as opposed to business software development) on the new Software Architects track.
Last year I made the mistake of re-presenting session from previous years at the request of some very well intentioned people who were running the show, but I will not make that same mistake again.
See you in Cairo!
A very good friend of mine reminded me that I have this blog that I have been neglecting and I must say that he is right. It is easy to fall out of a habit even one so important and I think in my case it has been that I always want to write really interesting things. The problem is that really interesting things is a really high bar and is almost always a matter of perspective.
Consider this the warning shot that I plan to come back to this blog and write about all aspects of technology and software development. Security when I have something to say, but overall there is alot left unsaid in the name of keeping the blog on topic.
Someone in my office just forwarded me a link to a video that has Scott Guthrie talking about ASP.Net. Not very unexpected, but the video turns out to be set inside Halo thanks to the crew a Red vs. Blue and it fabulous.
I don’t know what site it was originally hosted on, but if you remotely like Halo, or ASP.Net or Scott or anything remotely cool and / or entertaining, check it out!
Red vs. Blue themed ASP.Net ad featuring Scott Guthrie
StrangeLoop has finally announced their AppScaler device!
Richard Campbell told me about his involvement in StrangeLoop a while ago and I have been dying to tell people about it, but until now it has been confidential.
Basically the AppScaler takes a web farms major headaches and lifts them into the loadbalancer and out of the way of your developers. It really is a cool strategy because it gives sites real performance gains over hosting Session State on a state server or in a database along with a whole host of other performance enhancing and bandwidth saving features.
Check out the recent article at NetWorkWorld.com about it.
Most companies pay lip service to security, but the emphasis is just not there. There is bluster and maybe even a few conversions soon after an embarrassing security breach, but all too often a scapegoat is found, fired and then it is back to business as usual.
The missing element is real financial cost. Looks like Massachusetts and hopefully the feds will change that with new laws that make companies that get hacked pay for the cleanup.
I really like this kind of accountability. While I don’t think it will be a panacea solving all our problems it will put those to blame for these problems clearly on the hook for paying to clean them up.
Hopefully other states and Congress follow the lead of Massachusetts.
ZDNet recently had an article about new attacks that allow systems to be exposed to the worst kind of attacks just by visiting a web page with a bit of Javascript. The root of the problem is actually not changing the default passwords on those ubiquitous home routers from linksys and netgear (among others). As Duane Laflotte and I work on our book (I know it is about 2 years overdue), we are struck by the fact that there really aren’t many new kinds of attacks, just more ways to exploit the same old stupid mistakes people seem intent on ignoring forever.
If you bought a combination based high security lock system for a new car would you change the default code? What if the code was 0000? Would that be enough for you to realize that anyone who ever took a test drive or just made an effort to think about it could guess your code? Read the article and just think about how ridiculous this would be in any other arena other than computers. If we could just get people thinking about this stuff I think we would go a long way to reducing the security problems we see. The Spam storm that is clogging the Internet lately and other incidents might be much less common if this one little change could occur…
New games all the time, this one is Blog Tag. Don Sorcinelli tagged me via his blog and so now I am to write a blog entry that reveals things about me that you wouldn’t be likely to know and then tag others. I will do the first part to the letter, but will only tag a single individual instead of five.
Here goes:
– I was a pacifist until the age of 9. After that I went rabid and couldn’t be confused for a pacifist by anyone who has met me since.
– My nickname in High School was “NATO”. Even my teachers called me that.
– I was an avid fan of Battlestar Galactica and still have my trading cards. I just can’t get into the new series, but I have watched it and it is good, but the Cylons should be obviously mechanical.
– I still don’t watch war movies set in the Gulf. Tried, doesn’t work well.
– My mother was a Roman Catholic Nun for 2 years before she decided it wasn’t the life for her and left. Moral of the story is that I was brought up very Catholic.
– I served as an altar boy for over 3 years. Father Foley was the kind of priest from the movies in the 50s, not from movies to come.
– I drank at least a 6 pack of Coke everyday until later in 1991 when I quit cold turkey.
– I like most music except Jazz. I prefer Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC, The Eagles, Charlie Danials and Pink Floyd (varied to say the least).
– I watch MASH whenever it is on and I am home.
I have more, but you will have to buy me a drink (Ice Water) to hear it
I tag Duane Laflotte. He has now been tagged by both me and Don.
Forbes.com has a story about the use of typing patterns to identify whether a user is the actual user or a hacker.
I like the idea, though I fear it won’t catch on. Defense in depth, adding an edge is important, but the key element from this article comes at the very end where they say that if they suspect the user is not legit they will ask additional questions. This is the key to preventing (for the most part) denials of service to valid customers while still having a chance to catch the bad guys.