Harely 105 / HOG 25

Many of you know this, but perhaps not everyone...

In about 1 week I'm heading to the Harley 105 / HOG 25 celebration in Milwaukee. Originally Tina was going to go to; but she hasn't been feeling well lately and decided it would be too long of a trip. Because she was going to go; I planned the trip to be 3 weeks. Take a few days to get to St Louis where we'd meet up with some friends; spend a day there; then all of us head up to Milwaukee. Stopping about "a hundred miles out" somewhere on Wed (to avoid the high event hotel fees) then stay there Thur, Fri, Sat. Tina's Aunt Pat and Uncle Ward live in MI which is "so close", so we'd leave on Sun morning, take the ferry across a Great Lake, and then hang with them for a few days; then start the long ride back. Given Tina gets tired of riding after a few days, the plan was to do light riding for a couple of days; then spend a couple of days somewhere. Maybe stay in St Cloud, MN for a few days and just check the area out. Then go on to SD and check out Mount Rushmore, Sturgis, etc. Then finally head home. So all in all a 3 week trip. Lots of riding, but lots of breaks as well. So late last year I OKed that much time off at once with my boss and then have been double checking throughout the year.

So... I've got the time, and we discussed it and Tina still thinks I should go - so I'm going for it. However, now I'm going alone so the plans changed.

• I'm still taking the full 3 weeks, since I have it off anyway
  
• Terry, who is another Sheriff Architect, just bought a Harley this year, and has family in St Louis, is going with me.
  
• We are still meeting up with Ted and Christi in St Louis and hanging out there for a day or two. They are awesome and have a Toy-Hauler with double beds all set up and said the fridge would be stocked with beer and snacks and just show up when ever. Awesome. Also for the whole HOG "ABC Rally" thing I always do - there is a town with that starts with 'X' 2 hours away, so we are going to all go ride over there on Tue just for the fun of it, then head north as planned on Wed.
  
• Stop at Fast Eddie's; which I've mentioned before in this blog, on the way up.
  
• Then its the big event for 3 days. Lots of bands, lots of fun, lots of motorcycles... what could be cooler? :)
  
• Head to Aunt Pat's and Uncle Ward's as planned.
  
• While there get my bike serviced somewhere
  
• And from then on the plan is kind of up in the air. I've got about 12 days till I have to be back, and it would take maybe 4 to ride it! Even less if I pushed it. So I'm just heading down the road. I've got two different thoughts right now:
  • The plan was to come home through SD and I've got friends in WA, and haven't been "home" to MT forever - so maybe head up through MT to ID and then into Spokane.
    
  • Tif and Brian are going to be in MI about the same day I was planning on leaving Pat and Wards; but they will be down south in Detroit and maybe heading up to Sarnia for the day. So... I could meet them wherever along Lake Huron, then do some Canada traveling for a few days! Go into Sarnia and then up around the "outside" of Lake Huron and end up at Ste St Marie... And then maybe still head to MT.

So... I'm not sure at all the plan after Aunt Pat's... but that is kind of the plan. To hit the road and see where it takes me. I could also go up through Thunder Bay! Don't know. Basically there are a few goals:

• Not to be too planned
  
• Hit plenty of states, territories, counties, cities for the ABC Rally
  
• Cover lots of miles
  
• Go wherever it looks good
  
• Get home right before I have to go back to work.

If I hook up with Tif and Brian then that will add a bit more planning, but that is fine. So... lots of decisions to make in the next few days!

As noted on another post, I have set up Twitter. One of the main reasons I did that is that I can update my status via my cell phone, so while I'm on the road I can text msg where I'm at and anyone watching my facebook status or following me on Twitter will know what is going on. Pretty cool.

Plus I'll be taking plenty of ABC pictures, and hopefully other pictures as well, and I plan on uploading all of those to the computer and to facebook albums every night. That's all the plan... reality will probably be different, but hopefully close. :)

Sarah Connor Chronicles

And while I'm being geeky... I'm really stoked about the Sarah Connor Chronicles series that will air on 14-Jan-2008. First I'm a Terminator fan anyway (ever since my Philosophy of Space and Time TA suggested I watch it while I was at the UofM, as it was consistent with current theories of Time Travel), and more importantly... Summer Glau (yes, River from Firefly) will be playing a River like role - which will be really cool. Hopefully it is good and gets good ratings!

Oh... and other things I've seen her in are the 4400 and The Unit. Both shows I follow - although I didn't like her characters there as much, as they weren't as tough as River and Cameron and were kind of more regular people... well not the 4400 since she was one of the 4400 - but still, she wasn't so River-esque. :)

Some Firefly is better than No Firefly

So I'm in the mall today, going to Radio Shack to get a Y-connector, and on the way back I noticed the comic book store has novels as well. So I stop and ask the guy if there are any Firefly books, or are they just comics? He tells me that there is one comic, but he is out. However, there is a new Serenity comic book coming out in March! I tell him cool and start to leave.

G: Do you want to pre-order it?
M: Nah, I'll just get one when the come in.

He proceeds to explain that last time they had Firefly comics they sold out just on pre-orders and not everyone got them... so I might want to pre-order. Given it didn't cost anything to do it... I signed up.

So... now I've actually pre-ordered a SciFi comic book - 3 months in advance... Yeah... guess that makes me a Geek. I just had to laugh - and call Tif - 'cuz I knew she would appreciate it. I turned her on to Firefly and now she is hooked as well.

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence

Eliza was an early AI program that was sometimes said to act as a psychiatrist. We studied it in AI classes. How could a computer respond to questions and adapt? But it was pretty easy stuff as it just mimicked back what you said to it. I had a version of it on my Mac and played with it a bit.

Social engineering is a technique used to gather personal information from people by cyber criminals. I first came across the term when starting at MCI in relation to people calling and getting PBX information. How to hack a companies phone system so you could use it to make long distance calls.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) "bots" are "robots" (computer programs) that join a IRC channel and then monitor it. They can be good or bad. I've run them before to record all information on a channel and write it to a file, so we can always go back and remember what was said. There is also an infobot named purl which records information as it seems it or as someone tells it, and then monitors questions so it can answer them back later. An interactive "person like" way to store information on user chat channels so that someone doesn't always have to be on and responding to user questions.

Now, in Russia, they've all been combined. Now when someone is on a singles channel (or some other channel) and someone starts flirting with them, striking up a conversation and then asking them personal information... that "person" may not really be a person. It may be a new flirtation bot built to do just that... gather personal information from a social engineering point of view. That information can then be used to steal that personal information - which can then be used in any number of cyber crime sort of ways.

We've come a long way since Eliza...

Yet another thing VMS did right

For Geeks - a story on why VAX/VMS base time is 17-Nov-1858 and why it won't have any problems until 31-Dec-9999, unlike Unix which is going to have issues in 2032.

The software awards scam

Interesting article on 5 star awards given to software on download sites:

I put out a new product a couple of weeks ago. This new product has so far won 16 different awards and recommendations from software download sites. Some of them even emailed me messages of encouragement such as “Great job, we’re really impressed!”. I should be delighted at this recognition of the quality of my software, except that the ’software’ doesn’t even run. This is hardly surprising when you consider that it is just a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated a few times and then renamed as an .exe.

One of those nights

Lots going on at work - and we are in planning stages, not actually coding anything yet. So having big design discussions. Woke up at 1:15AM with all kinds of thoughts flowing around in my head. They'll just stick there and keep me away if I don't get them "on paper". So logged in and updating the wiki with new interface specifications and design thoughts. There... emptied the brain out for now. 3:10 AM - time to go back to bed for a few hours.

Night all...

Slinging code

Yesterday was a very busy, but good day at work.

We are working on a new system using a different domain (different type of Sheriff system - using data and customer's that we haven't worked with that much before). So that in itself is interesting. Always cool to see what we can do with the system, how we can attack a domain, help a customer, etc.

We've been standing this system up pretty fast and two of our customer's were going to be here this week. We showed them an initial prototype of the system a while back, and Monday we showed two of them what we had since then. We planned on having aother demo for their VP today (Wed). During the demo the customer said, "It would be really cool if you could by Wed." and then went out to say some more stuff. After a minute or two I said, "Did you say that would be cool by Wed??" He laughed and said yes - it would probably show some very cool stuff if we could get that in. So I said I'd give it a shot. My boss said to try it but don't worry about it if I could get it done.

The "It would be cool if" combined with "Don't worry if you can't get it done"... yeah, pretty much threw down the gauntlet. :)

Another person on the team started pulling data we needed, another one worked on some GUI changes, and I started writting rules and slinging backend code. Had to change code for numerous parts of the system - plus write tests for all of it since we are test driven. I skipped some afternoon meetings and had some initial components coded by the time I went home. Got up at 3:30 AM and started coding more.

Got a few more components coded and was feeling pretty good. Worked out, made Moroccan Chicken, got ready for work and headed in for a 9:00 meeting. During the meeting said we'd probably have code ready today (Tue) so we could look at it before the demo.

By early afternoon most of it was in place - but I was starting to feel a little anxious. Just like in school. You know you can get the project done, but you've been slinging code and not thinking about it too much. I was really shoe-horning it in, but it looked like it was all going to come together. Started the system a few times, sending data and each time some small thing didn't work quite right. Now it was after 3:00 and folks wanted to see it before they left for the day... Always nice to see what you are going to demo the previous day. No surprises!

So - I'm sending data - checking things, fixing things. Just small stupid stuff.

And then our acceptance tester, who was just following along on irc and had an idea of what was going on, said "Hey, is this supposed to work like this?" He's great. Caught a bug w/o having a big discussion. Just added some tests and was running them as I was updating CVS and caught something. I took a look - yup, got an issue, discussed it and got a fix in and he re-tested. Looks good.

Then about 4:00 - cool - looks like data is going through. The GUI guy (working remote) said on irc - "We've got data!" and I brought the GUI up and there it was. :) :)

Spent the next few hours on irc talking to one of the customers (who really liked what he saw) and then going over it with management who was probably going to demo it.

All in all - a fairly intense 24 hours of coding. Not an all nighter like I used to pull, but still - some fairly focused, a little stressed, gotta get it done, programming. It rakwed :)

Wouldn't want to do it every day, but once in a while that kind of effort is really fun. Reminded me of school... I started craving Jolt cola and Domino's pizza. ;)

Demo is right after lunch. Should be very good!

Work

Works been really busy... from a "there is a lot going on" point of view, more than "there is a ton of work everyday" point of view. I guess - lots to think about / work on, vs tons of coding to do.

I'm kind of getting back to more of an architecture, take a bigger picture sort of role, and less of a day-to-day, down in the trenches, coding point of view. Which is cool, 'cuz I like the bigger picture better. But it was good to spend 18 months down in the trenches. Not that I've stopped coding, its just in this current spurt I can spend an hour a morning and some time here and there during the day coding, and still get done what I need to - and spend the rest of the time looking at ways to improve things, consulting with other folks etc.

Its an exciting time for us. We didn't do much new work for quite some time, and then in Oct 2005 we started a new implmentation using an Agile/XP approach. It was some cool new work. Got that up and running and kind of put it in maintenance mode and spread XP to a few more legacy teams. Then in Dec went and talked to some new customers and put up an intial stab at a new system in a week. That was very cool. A full system, taking data and displaying it to the users - in one week. Now working the second phase of that. And besides that we are in intial phases of another new implementation and then met yesterday to talk about a 3rd one. So - pretty much mainteance mode and improving existing systems for several years, and now a new system 18 months ago and then 3 more this month. And we are hiring again.

We are now considered one of the top 100 critical projects in all of IT. So the execs know about us and talk about us. Lets us do some cool stuff - but with the spotlight can come the pressure. But all good things.

So anyway, work is exciting and keeping me plenty busy.

Ideas Vs. Execution

I ended up here from Hugh Hewitt's site for a totally different reason. But then read a few more entries and found this one: Ideas Vs. Execution. From that post:

This is a great quote cited in Getting Real where they are discussing the importance or of getting things done rather than deliberating over decisions. In other words - when developing web software - make decisions quickly and then build. If you make a bad decision - the web is flexible enough to change later.

Be An Executioner

It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an nda to tell me the simplest idea.)

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

We are so running into this lately. We have a potential project that can help solve a very real, very big problem. We know what we want to do initially. Its a big problem. There are multiple ways to attack it. Take an Agile/XP/LetsGetStarted approach, and tackle one small part of the problem and get something out that is useful. Then build on it. This domain space is also quickly changing. So the problem we might attack today, might not even exist a year from now. In other words, as you put together detection capabilities, folks (like fraudsters) realize you are detecting them and adapt. So - attack the problem today with a system that can quickly evolve, and as things change, adapt the system. Or you can take a waterfall/letsFigureItAllOutNow approach and take 6 months or a year to come up with "the final solution" and by the time you get it built, it will no longer address the problem because its out-of-date.

Convincing people of this, in a large company, where they are use to the "we have to know everything up-front" approach, is almost impossible. Sigh. So you do what you can.

In any case, since I've been dealing with this lately, it was interesting to read something that was sort of addressing the same problem.

joke of the day

irc post by "opie" at work:

Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?

to To other side. get the

The Nature of LISP

A great article on the powers of the LISP programming language. I'm going to have to read it multiple times and think on it. Last year I did a little bit of LISP programming during the holidays. I think I'm going to have to do some more...

Its all relative

Working on some code the last few days. Was using one design that was really nice, but someone brought up that it might be a little slower than another approach. My design was nicer - but we need to worry about performance so I figured I'd better benchmark it.

It took an extra second to process 2500 records. Doesn't sound like much, but when you process 25 million records - it comes out to 2.77 hours in a day. So yeah, need to update the design.

And given we are processing 280 million records a day overall, in some cases you have to make it a bit more ugly if its going to save you some time.

System, method and computer program product for processing event records

Woo hoo, patent #4. I didn't even know we have filed a fourth one. I think that is all of them now. Guess its time to invent something else. ;)

Googling for Code

You can now google for code.

Here is an article about it.

And another article that talks about hackers using it to find security holes.