Microsoft Northeast Roadshow Coming to Albany!

Chris Bowen, Microsoft Developer Evangelist out of Boston, managed to get Albany on the itinerary for the Fall 2008 Northeast Roadshow. Thanks, Chris & Jim!

This event has bypassed us in the past. What is a Northeast tech roadshow without a stop in the heart of Tech Valley?

Quick Agenda:

8:30 – Registration

9:00 – Understanding the ADO.NET Entity Framework

10:30 – Discovering Dynamic Data

11:15 - Exploring Internet Explorer 8

12:00 – RoboLunch

1:00 - UI, UX, U Confused?

1:45 - A RESTed Development

3:15 - Befriending Unit Testing

4:00 – Wrapup, Giveways, and Bon Voyage!

Looking forward to the Robotics Studio, IE8 and especially the REST stuff myself!

Computer forensics & cloud computing

By now, if you're active enough of an online user to be reading this blog, you've surely heard of "cloud computing." You may even have heard of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their Elastic Compute Cloud, more commonly referred to as EC2.

Cloud computing offers a lot of possibilities and potential. Let's not forget, it "levels the playing field," and all that other corporate jargon that hopefully translates into delivering Fortune 100 computing capabilities to those of us technical sorts who don't, or who no longer, work for the 800 pound gorillas of the industry.


Clouds also unfortunately seem to offer a lot of surface area for abuse and crime. Email spammers have been loving EC2 -- it didn't take long for most of AWS' IP range to get blacklisted by all the major spam watchlists.


What about something a little more sinister? What if an evil foreign spy or terrorist or hacker needs a place to host a bot command & control server, or a temporary shell account for accessing a more meaningful target, or needs a private place to host a "sensitive" IRC conversation or dead drop some blueprints?

When you shut down an AMI instance on EC2, that image resets to its stored state -- all session data is lost. All typical system & service logs, gone. Sure, I know you still have logging at the boundary of the cloud, but with the huge amount of potential data flowing in and out of a cloud, how do you identify individual users of individual services provided by a transient host image, particularly when they make expert efforts to cover their tracks? And what if the owner of the image decides to engage in malicious behavior, through the host server image, from a third IP address, and then claim someone must have stolen their password or keypair to the image?


Now I'm no security expert, perhaps this isn't as big a potential issue as I make it out to be. I'd love to be contradicted here!

Of course, none of that is as scary as the thought of this guy as our Commander in Chief.


Edit: It was noted on #freehackersunion that Tor, and for that matter other such services, offer you an ability to put an anonymous host on the Internet already. Sure, but Tor's bandwidth typically sucks, and the guy sitting on the exit owns you. EC2 basically commoditizes anonymous hosts, all you need is a stolen ID and credit card number.

Assert.IsTrue(newspapersAreDying);

I know it's been said before, but I was shocked when I took a look at former-employer Gannett's stock price this morning -- a paltry $17.xx!

View the GCI WikiChart on Wikinvest

They were treading near or around 80 when I started in November of 2002. They were in the low 50s I believe when I bailed in December 2005. The site I was at, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, was doing about 8 million hits a month with over a quarter million unique visitors ... but just didn't "get it" when it came to technology. They became followers rather than innovators, led by the nose by page views and ad campaigns, mimicking their socially-successful neighboring markets of Buffalo and Syracuse, but only years after their lead tech guy (me) had tried to encourage forums and article comments. Rather pathetic -- so much wasted potential and lead time.

They were starting to push the "hyperlocal reporting" and "local data machine" campaigns in a very drone-like fashion in my waning time there. I had some hope for them when they made the token effort of changing their "newsrooms" to "information centers," but unfortunately I think that corporation is too filled with stodgy, curmudgeonly personalities and mindsets to make the transition to the 21st century anytime this decade. No dancing elephants there -- no Lou Gerstner either, for sure. Over the past five years all their sites have, through corporate edict and ad-driven mania, become cookie cutter, ad-noisy copies of one another. Gross. AdBlock Plus is your friend.

Recently, an editor at the Glens Falls Post-Star haughtily insisted to me, via a poorly-designed article commenting system, that the newspaper wasn't dying -- "just look at all the hits this site gets!" Tell that to your parent corp's stock price:

View the LEE WikiChart on Wikinvest

Just for comparison, let's see how the innovation-friendly (ish) big-budget New York Times has been doing over the same 5-year period:

View the NYT WikiChart on Wikinvest

Only slightly better than the corporately-retarded Gannett Co, Inc.

Say it with me now: "Newspapers are environmentally-disastrous dinosaurs, please quit wasting time, money and resources, liquidate your assets and finish laying off your underpaid workforce already."

Short circuit - Meetup.com steals my soul

I never thought this day would come.

I've hit a personal pseudo-Singularity from which I can never return.

This morning, at approximately 4:30AM Eastern, I felt ... wait for it ... over wired!

I've always enjoyed being as connected as I could be. Writing BASIC, Apple BASIC, BASICA, GW-BASIC in elementary school. Modems and BBSes and QBasic and CompuServe and early AOL when I was still a kid. Writing LEGO LOGO in middle school. The wide, wide world of websites, the Internet, opening in high school and beyond. The pagers, the cell phones, dial-up, broadband, ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, clients, servers, distributed systems, SOA. An evolution I never stopped loving. Until today.

At approximately 4:30AM this morning, I was woken by a SMS notification, heard from my bedroom, on my HTC Wizard charging in the living room. SMS had grown noisy -- Twitter was overwhelming, every other SMS-notifying service was making me simply ignore SMS notifications, missing truly important ones -- so I had trimmed it down to just the ping monitoring service used to monitor critical websites and systems, and ...

Meetup. Meetup.com. It's nice, a little while before a Meetup, to get an SMS reminder with an address or directions in it. Very, very handy. I belong to a number of meetups, both here in Albany and in New York, so occasionally the event reminder itself is valuable as well.

There was an Albany small business Meetup scheduled for this morning, though it was a halfhearted effort that never really materialized, in part due to the organizer being out of town, in part due to people being lazy and otherwise occupied in summer. That Meetup was scheduled for 7:30am.

Ever so kindly, Meetup.com sent me an SMS reminder, a few hours before the Meetup. At 4:30 in the morning. There's no SMS scheduling for Meetup, like any sensible SMS-utilizing service, like Twitter. Perhaps Meetup's new backers, Union Square Ventures -- also early and heavily invested backers of Twitter -- need to encourage Meetup to get with the program like the rest of the crowds that they're claiming to source. Being unable to prevent a 4:30AM SMS from a non-critical service like Meetup.com is unacceptable.

Sure, if I wasn't at this point retrained, like one of Pavlov's dogs, to respond to that SMS chime on my smartphone, I probably would have slept through it, but still, the option to schedule SMS notification through Meetup.com is a simple and necessary feature.

Philo-blurb: child vs. adult

I've been ridiculously busy -- I'll be back to posting on a more regular schedule soon! Major software release underway at the day job, and lots of good stuff going on with Change Round-Up!

Wanted to shoot a little blurb out into the blogosphere: children sit around and talk about what they dream of achieving. Adults, on the other hand, talk about what they're doing to achieve those things.

Am I off here? Am I too much of a cynic? Are adults "allowed" to idly dream as well? Who has time for that?