StreamJockey

Quick Timeout for The Blues

My wife Eileen and I stopped by the Ground Zero Blues Club in Mississippi after dropping off our son Ryan at Ole Miss. Located next door to the Delta Blues Museum in the heart of historic downtown Clarksdale. Owned by local attorney and businessman, Bill Luckett; Academy Award-winning actor and Mississippi Delta resident, Morgan Freeman; and Clarksdale native and Memphis entertainment executive, Howard Stovall. 

Sketchnotes: Agile training day at Made by Many

Informative sketches of agile practices. http://madebymany.co.uk/sketchnotes-agile-training-day-at-made-by-many-004299

Many Iterations -> Many Bugs = Cranky Coworkers « Coffee’s Gone Already?

It’s trite, but let me begin by saying how much I love Agile. Now I’m going to bash it — but gently — because I truly think that it’s the most reasonable approach to the environment in wich software is being engineered.

via coffeesgone.wordpress.com

Real life agile! Sam's post is a good read.

IEEE Spectrum: Trouble Brewing for Wind?

Amid much good news for wind--an onging global surge in wind energy installations, the go-ahead from the U.S. government for the immensely controversial Cape Wind project--comes a report detailing a sharp rise in wind operating costs and poor performance relative to other countries. Prepared by the independent business intelligence service Wind Energy Update, the Wind Energy Operations & Maintenance Report finds that current O&M costs are two or three times higher than first projected and that there has been a 21 percent decrease in returns on investments in wind farms. O&M costs were found to be especially high in the United States, "now the world's largest wind power market."

via spectrum.ieee.org

Cocoa Is My Girlfriend » ZDS Code Style Guide

We have come to that point in the company’s life that I can no longer review every single line of code before it is passed either to a customer or put directly into production. However, there is always going to be the situation where I need to dive into a piece of code to get an issue sorted out; even if it is just another set of eyes on the problem.

via www.cimgf.com

Examples of ultra-light use cases

My current project is ultra-light.I’m trying to replace the Media Wiki engine running my website, because I think Media Wiki is crippled when it comes to any media besides text and images (but never mind that for now). What’s interesting is that this is not a fixed-anything project, it consists entirely of one programmer and me. I pay for it out of my pocket, we pair-program whenever we’re both available, and he/we work on it about one day a week.

via alistair.cockburn.us

A New Law that Will Change the Way You Build Database Applications

Massachusetts recently passed a sweeping new data security law that will have a profound impact on the way the United States, and perhaps the rest of the world, manages and develops data-centric applications. Oddly, most people in the business don’t seem to know about it.Google “Massachusetts data security law, 201 CMR 17.00” and you’ll find plenty of facts about the new law. I also encourage you to read InformationWeek’s "States' Rights Come to Security Forefront: Massachusetts' new data protection law reaches beyond its borders. Are you ready?" It’s one of the best summaries I’ve seen. But even it falls short of helping you understand the profound impact of this law. Here are the basics of the new law. If you have personally identifiable information (PII) about a Massachusetts resident, such as a first and last name, then you have to encrypt that data on the wire and as it’s persisted. Sending PII over HTTP instead of HTTPS? That’s a big no no. Storing the name of a customer in SQL Server without the data being encrypted?  No way, Jose. You’ll get a fine of $5,000 per breach or lost record. If you have a database that contains 1,000 names of Massachusetts residents and lose it without the data being encrypted that’s $5,000,000. Yikes.Perhaps just as much fun is the fact that to be compliant with the law your company will also need to maintain a Written Information Security Plan (WISP) and file it with the state of Massachusetts. The WISP must address and outline your business’s “technical, administrative, and physical safeguards” that are in place to protect the data. If you lost a laptop without a WISP being filed with Massachusetts, you’re potentially on the hook for a cool million even if the data was encrypted. Yikes again.If I didn’t know better, I’d think the security czar of Massachusetts (or whatever the title is of the person who wrote this law) was a SQL Server sales executive because the law could sell a heck of a lot of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition upgrades to get Transparent Data Encryption and other useful Enterprise Edition–only features in the OS and database stack. By the way, this law doesn’t affect just businesses in MA. It also affects businesses that have PII for Massachusetts residents. Do you know if the application you’re building for a company in Virginia might ever store Massachusetts resident data? Unless you’re sure that it never, ever will, you better be compliant with Massachusetts data security law, 201 CMR 17.00. What if you’re sure and then one of your employees moves from Virginia to Massachusetts? Well, now you probably have PII for a MA resident. Yikes again. This law changes pretty much everything we need to do and think about with respect to building database applications. I could wax eloquently on about the potential battle of states’ rights versus federal oversight and the potential for a Supreme Court challenge based on the Commerce Clause, but, this is an article for geeks, so I won’t go there. Instead, I’ll simply say once again: yikes. Please check out msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc278098.aspx for a nice review of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition security features compared and contrasted to other ways to encrypt data on a Microsoft data stack.

via www.sqlmag.com

InformIT: An Interview with Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers >

Last month, Larry O’Brien wrote an article for the SD Times on the most influential software development books of the last ten years. One of those books was Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt's The Pragmatic Programmer. Larry follows up with Dave and Andy in this interview, where we learn that the best thing to improve code quality is a good hard disk crash, how nothing—not even agile methods—works in all environments all of the time, and how programmers can reconcile their glorious cherubic visions with the axle-sucking mud of reality.

via www.informit.com

90% of Content on Google Buzz Is Bots, Report Finds - NYTimes.com

Less than 10 weeks after launching, Google Buzz seems so far to have fallen short of capturing the hearts and minds of the social web. A new report from social media analytics service PostRank has found that 90% of the content published into Buzz is automated: 63% is piped in from Twitter and 27% is from automated RSS feeds.

via www.nytimes.com

Bletchley, England: Powering Hendrix and saving the free world!

Marshall Amplification plc. a.k.a. Marshal Amps and Bletchley Park National Codes Centre are located about a 0.5 mile from each other as shown on Google Maps.

History

Bletchley Park was the main site of the British decryption facilities. The Bletchley Park Wikipedia post goes into the exciting history and has many links to key people involved. Many top mathematicians and cipher analysts worked there.   

One of them was Allan Turing, the mathematician who became influential in the development of computer science.

And I learned that three Polish mathematicians and cryptologists were the first to solve the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine in 1932. That was the main cipher device used by Germany, and their work gave the British a jump start on reading the Enigma of World War II.

Pictured on the right is the Colossus computer invented by Tommy Flowers at Bletchley Park. These were the world's first electronic, digital, programmable computing devices. They used vacuum tubes to perform the calculations. And it was vacuum tubes that powered Jimi's Marshall amps about 20 years later! To this day some of the most expensive amps are vacuum tube powered. Most amps today use solid state electronics (built with solid materials as opposed to the somewhat fragile glass vacuum tubes).

Movies

Relevant movies include Sekret Enigmy, a 1979 Polish movie with English subtitles that is likely more historically accurate than most. An American made movie U-571 (2000) was enjoyable, but it was not very accurate.

And on the Hendrix side we have Jimi Hendrix - Live At Woodstock released in 2005 about 389 years after the event.

   

Jimi's first Marshall - a Super 100    Bletchley Park