Insomnia

This weekend, I experienced something truly awe inspiring. I went to Flight Fest Ottawa and caught a show by the Snowbirds. I had seen them on TV before but TV doesn’t do justice to this experience. I cannot describe the feeling of 9 jet-powered aircraft in tight formation coming out of nowhere to pass at high speed and low altitude above your head. Then, in perfect synch, break formation and split in a symmetrical, flower-like shape right in front of you. These guys are good and they give an amazing show. If they come around your neighborhood, don’t miss the opportunity to see then. It is definitely worth the admission price.

• 0 Comments

Recently, Matt (our resident Marketing expert) was suggesting the creation of a technical newsletter to raise awareness for our company. I pointed-out to him that the newsleters that I had registered to in the past didn't reach me anymore as they were caught by my spam filters. I did register to these newsleters but now, it takes me too much time to dig them-out. I had trouble making my point but Using RSS to Deliver Newsletters makes my point for me. Don't you like that!

• 0 Comments

And I thought they were only a nuisance. It seems that the movie industry is blaming texting for this summer's blockbuster flops. Instead of the fact that the movies might actually lack quality. (Found that link through a blog but I don't remember which one)

• 0 Comments

This week, I was doing interviews for a new position at Macadamian and all the kids (yes, I’m allowed to say kids) that I got to interview were 10 years younger than me. I find it harder to relate to them than I used to. Well maybe it’s not my place to relate personally to the candidates but thankfully, my colleague Sylvain and me have done a fair amount of interviews in the past, and we have a half-decent process in place with prepared questions and areas for each of us to poke and prod.

Still I was wishing that we had a more objective way to test the technical abilities of our candidates. I was harboring the evil thought of scheduling my candidates for 3-hour hands-on interviews where they would get to perform exercises like Dave Thomas’ katas while being observed and rated on the method used and their problem solving skills. To this, we would add a formal code review to assess their reaction and handling of criticism. We could even schedule the hands-on sessions of many of the candidates together and have then peer-review each other’s work. (Now that's really evil)

Anyway, I’m saying it’s an evil thought because I have never been through an interview like this and I have never heard of anyone that went through such an interview. Maybe I’ve never heard about something like this because the last time I performed interviews, there was a dearth of programming talent and we were very careful not to turn-off the precious few candidates we had. With the job market the way it is nowadays, I don’t think that the candidates would refuse to participate in such an experiment. I guess it's just a matter of spending enough time to prepare such an experiment and gathering enough balls to put our candidates through it.

• 0 Comments

For a while now, I have been bugging people around me by taking the high road with regards to this whole WiFi thing. I’ve been telling my friends that they should just try to find an alternate way to wire their house as the security of these networks sucked. And here I am running to Future Shop to buy a wireless base station as soon as I got me a device that had WiFi built in. I will still stand my ground when it comes to installing that kind of device at my workplace but I guess that the security built into my home network is sufficient for the value of the information that transits on it.

Still, I spent some time reading stuff related to WiFi networks and I stumbled on an entry in Ray Ozzie’s weblog where he talks about reasonable expectation of privacy on open WiFi networks and the legality of sniffing the traffic or even wardriving for interesting tidbits in front of a politician’s home.

I don’t know much about American law but I know of a couple of offences in the Canadian Criminal Code that apply to that kind of thing:

And:

Now, I am not a lawyer but this definitely sounds like it would apply to wardriving at least. In any case, it doesn’t mean that because it’s illegal you shouldn’t protect yourself against it. After all people lock their house door even if it is illegal for someone unauthorized to just walks in.

• 0 Comments

Last week, I replaced my trusted Linksys with a "Microsoft brand" router/wireless base station. The documentation from the packaging suggested an automated setup procedure that would detect my network settings and perform the necessary setup on the base station. While that setup was going on, I plugged my PC back into the DSL modem directly to let the software pick-up the settings automatically. The setup couldn’t have taken more than 40 seconds. However, during that time, I had 2 "Windows system messages" that were successfully sent to my machine advertising various products.

In retrospect, I’m not really surprised about that I was just caught off guard as my router was successful at protecting me from all this crap for years. I just had a stray thought for my mother and her high-speed Web connection. Made me realize that it’s my job, as a "geek", to make sure that my "less technical" friends are made aware of all the information they can handle with regards to their new found "Web-literacy".

Well, enough with the preaching. In case you’re interested, I was impressed with the router. Actually, I was impressed with the software. The setup was easy and it forced me to supply a "non-default" password and it also turned WEP encryption on by default (I know it ain’t much but at least it’s on by default). The web-based configuration utility was very well done and easy to use. It was well laid-out and I was able to set-up MAC filtering for wireless connections in just a few minutes. I have to admit that I was surprised with the quality of the software and how quickly I forgot the high standard of quality that they got us used to over the years.

• 0 Comments