Is this thing on?

Wow! It’s been over a year since this blog o’ mine has seen any activity, though I’ve certainly not forgot about it. A lot has happened in the last year, so I’ll use this post as a bit of an update (and a warm-up for my return to blogging).

I’m not going to promise you’ll see a new post daily as was once the case, though I’ll try to ensure something new is up at least once a week.

Life – It’s been an exciting year; I’ve moved into a new house, now engaged (the big day is in May), and I’m now driving a Mazda CX-7. There’s a lot more, but I’ll not bore you with too many details.

The house is a restored 1880’s farmhouse that has some great history. Buying a house is an adventure, especially in this market. Scary might be a better word. The only real problem, is much like Jeff’s (of 37signals fame), it’s in the middle of nowhere. My solution for the Internet issue was to sign up for Satellite Internet; it’s laggy but it works.

The new ride replaced my ‘07 Jetta (which was a great car), the CX-7 has lots of power (244 HP), full-time all-wheel drive, and a very sporty feel. It’s a great car, and for a mid-size SUV it does pretty well on fuel.

Hosting – When I last posted I had been with RadicalV for a few weeks shy of four years. When I left they were pretty much falling apart – downtime was common, no support at all, and numerous other issues. Once I moved to the next host, it took them three months to cancel the account and stop billing me. It started out as the best host I’d ever used, and ended as the worst. My understanding is that the company was sold since then, so hopefully things have improved for their remaining customers.

After leaving RadicalV, I went a fairly new (at the time) host, HostingRails. I was mostly happy with them; great service, reasonable prices, and the very latest of everything. The major downside though was the server loads. It wasn’t uncommon for the load to be so high that it was grinding to a halt. Great service but it seems they are pretty oversold.

And now? I’m currently on Servage because of its clustered environment and low prices. As time goes on, I’ll post updates on how this one works out.

Computers – My primary laptop has changed from my trusty Acer to the ultra mobile Dell Mini 9. At just over two pounds and up to four hours of battery life, it’s a carry anywhere on the go type system. It’s great.

It’s not the cheapest of the so called netbooks, but with a little work it’s a great system. I’m running Windows 2008 Server with the Desktop Experience Pack. When configured correctly, it’s a killer system.

Work – I’m still at the same company, though my responsibilities have changed. I’ve crossed the line into management. I’ve often heard the joke that managing developers is more like herding cats – it’s quite true.

This Site – I’ve upgraded the site to the latest beta release of WordPress, 2.7 Beta 3. What does this mean for you? Not too much. If you have a blog, I highly recommend you upgrade. I upgraded from 2.2 and it was quite painless.

I’ll be posting on management styles and tools and tricks soon.

So, there we go – I think we’re all caught up now. 🙂

Adam Caudill

The Pressure to Be Great

I’m a developer, and I love what I do, it’s a great industry, and a very exciting field to be in. If you read my blog often, you’ll see I take every opportunity to mention how great this line of work can be, today I offer a somewhat different, less sugar-coated view. The Pressure There is a constant pressure on developers to be better, to do more, to produce more, sometimes more than is possible.

Hugo & Content-Based Related Content

During my Christmas vacation last year, I converted this site from WordPress to Hugo; while I’ve been happy with the change, a couple of features are missing. One of these is that there was a section with related content at the bottom of each post. I wanted to get it back. Thankfully Hugo has native support for Related Content, so while I was hoping this would be a simple task, there’s a note that made things substantially more complicated:

Declaring War on Ransomware

It’s time for everyone from the industry, developers, and the government to declare war on ransomware and make it as hard as possible for them to ply their insidious trade. There have been false starts and baby steps, diligent fighters without enough resources, and vendors that have only given a nod to the issue. It’s time to use every tool reasonably available to stop this scourge. For so many in the industry that have dedicated so much of their time and effort to this fight, this statement may seem to diminish their efforts, but that is not my intent.

Write Like You Are Running Out of Time

The cultural phenomenon that is Hamilton, brought back to the forefront due to its streaming release, is an artistic feat, but it also serves as an opportunity to refresh our memories on the history behind these characters, and look for opportunities to learn lessons that apply today. This is exactly what I’ve been doing. For all of his flaws, one thing that I have to respect about Alexander Hamilton (as well as his wife, Eliza) is the understanding of the long-term impact of the written word.

Exploiting the Jackson RCE: CVE-2017-7525

Earlier this year, a vulnerability was discovered in the Jackson data-binding library, a library for Java that allows developers to easily serialize Java objects to JSON and vice versa, that allowed an attacker to exploit deserialization to achieve Remote Code Execution on the server. This vulnerability didn’t seem to get much attention, and even less documentation. Given that this is an easily exploited Remote Code Execution vulnerability with little documentation, I’m sharing my notes on it.