Lots of folks talk lovingly about their first computers. Mine was a Timex Sinclair I ran through my 10” black-and-white TV. But that wasn’t the first computer I played with. My Dad was pretty early into the word processing world as part of his law practice. So when we went to the computer show down in NYC and checked out all the new wares, I was like a kid in a candy store.
Rich here.
Last night I arrived home around 11pm from the totally awesome SecTor conference in Toronto. It took about 11 hours to wend my way home through the air system, which has a certain beauty.
There were always reasons I wasn’t a runner. I was too big and carried too much weight. I was prone to knee pain. I never had good endurance. I remember the struggle when I had to run 3 miles as a pledge back in college. I finished, but I was probably 10 minutes behind everyone else. Running just wasn’t for me. So I focused on other methods of exercise. I lifted weights until my joints let me know that wasn’t a very good idea. Then I spent a couple years doing too many 12-ounce curls and eating…
It won’t happen to you, right? After every breach you see all sorts of former employees and others crawl out from under their various rocks to talk about how screwed-up their former employer was. And how the breach was inevitable. It is a bit comical at this point. The latest example is a bunch of former Home Depot employees talking about their old shop.
This is off topic, but this post from Daniel Miessler is a great example of how I want to reorient my world view.
Ever tried to count to a billion? Don’t bother. The average human lifespan is about 2.5 billion seconds, so you’d waste half your life trying. But that may help put into perspective Databrick’s latest announcement that they were able to sort 10 trillion records in four hours with the Spark platform. That’s three times faster than the previous record, with one-tenth the number of server nodes. Or perhaps you noticed that Amazon added full JSON support to DynamoDB, so you can easily inject JSON…
A few years ago I had to stop competing. The constant need to win – whatever that even meant – was making me unhappy. Even when things were going well, I found some reason to feel like a loser. So I got off the hamster wheel and put myself in positions where I wasn’t really competing against others. I am always trying to improve, but I stopped doing that in terms of others. Set a goal. Work toward it. Adjust as needed.
Writing is an oddly physical act.
Technically you are just sitting there, clanking away on the keyboard, while your bottom loses circulation and gets sore. (Maybe I need a new chair.) But keeping your brain running at the right tempo for effective writing involves a complicated dance of nutrition, sleep, physical movement, and environmental management.
Our last post reviewed key tools to conduct security tests in the development process, and before that we discussed big picture process adjustments to accommodate security testing, but didn’t fully how to integrate. Agile itself is in the middle of a major disruptive evolution, transforming into a new variant called DevOps, bringing significant long-term implications which are beneficial to security. The evolution of development security and Agile are closely tied together, so we can start by…
Mike, Adrian, and I start off a little rough around the edges, but eventually get to the point. Travel is taking its toll so we won’t be able to keep our usual weekly schedule, but we will stay as close as possible – until I run off to Amsterdam for a week, for Black Hat Europe. We catch up on the inane for a few minutes, before jumping into a discussion of the bash vulnerability and disclosure debacle. We agree it is often valuable to analyze an event after the initial shock waves (See what I…