Blue Hole Waterfall
Taking a rather extended lunch break today, I went to the Blue Hole waterfall near Elizabethton in east Tennessee. What a sight! I know my policy is to avoid blogging about things not related to the IT/Software Development industry, but this sight is certainly worth breaking the policy. If you like waterfalls, or just ‘getting away" this is a great place to go. If you’d like to see more, I’ve uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr page.
Read more…Data Theft: It’s happened again
Somehow, this story sounds familiar. A total of 243,000 credit card numbers stolen, that many more potential victims. Yet, they are far from alone, just a few weeks ago, data (including social security numbers) for 26 million vets was stolen. This is becoming an ugly trend. No matter how many reminders, it seems the message never makes it through. There is no shortage of products that would have made both of these stories much less important, but it both cases there was no real attempt to protect the data.
Read more…WordPress Update
The WordPress team has released 2.0.3 of the massively popular blogging software. The primary reason is a security fix, but also includes a few performance tweaks. The install process was fairly painless thanks to the work of Mark Jaquith, using the provided patch reduced the total upgrade time to under an hour. For the average WordPress user that doesn’t have any modified files, the install should take only a couple minutes.
Read more…Valleyschwag Delivers
Valleyschwag has delivered! There for a couple days I was worried as the middle of the month went by without a word, but on Friday, word went out that the schwag shipped. And today, just four days later, it has arrived. I’ll admit, I was a bit unsure about this idea at first, but now that I’ve got my hands on this pile o’ goodies, I’m hooked. Not only is Valleyschwag a great marketing idea, but so far has proved to be a great service.
Read more…Responsibility meets Marketing
While this is probably more about marketing than anything, Anti-Virus vendor Computer Associates is offering a free one year subscription (press release) of it’s EZ Antivirus product to beta testers of Windows Vista. This is the type of responsibility that more vendors should accept, there are thousands of Vista boxes now running, and one can only guess how many have no form of virus protection in place. CA is not only making a great business decision, they are also helping to serve the community by reducing the number of unprotected systems connected to the internet.
Read more…MaskedTextBox Madness
Over the last couple days, most of my time has been devoted to the MaskedTextBox control, and one very annoying bug. The issues revolve around the way the control deals with currency. When provided with a mask such as ‘$999,999,999’ – you’d expect it to exercise some degree of intelligence. That expectation turned out to be quite wrong. If you type the number ‘50’ in a box with that mask, you’ll end up with ‘$500,000,000’ – for a financial application such as the one I’m working on, that could lead to a major issue.
Read more…Internet Explorer 7+
Microsoft has announced the naming of the Windows Vista edition of IE. Internet Explorer 7+ will be the name used to refer to the Vista edition, while 7 (minus the plus) will be used to reference the non-Vista edition. While the name has been changed for Vista, this seems to mostly be about marketing (or communication) as the User-Agent for both edition will contain MSIE 7.0 – no plus.
Read more…Happy (Belated) Birthday VB!
To celebrate 15 years of Visual Basic, a quick glance to the past: Microsoft Announces Visual Basic at Windows World ‘91 General-Purpose, High-Productivity Programming System for Microsoft Windows ATLANTA — May 20, 1991 — Microsoft today announced MicrosoftR Visual BasicTM programming system at the Windows World ‘91 industry trade show. Visual Basic is a graphical application development system for Microsoft WindowsTM graphical environment version 3.0 that combines visual design tools with a powerful, general-purpose programming language and Windows .
Read more…The Schwag Has Shipped
Valleyschwag has shipped the second issue of their bundle o’ schwag to approximately 1,500 subscribers, up from 50 for the first issue. The growth is amazing, and so is the money involved. This month they should have seen somewhere around $21,500 in gross revenue. For a part-time project where you are just mailing out free stuff, $22,000 a month is not bad at all. There are of course a number of expenses, but this is what’s important: this is an innovative business model that really works.
Read more…Web Developer Toolbar & Menu for Opera
I’ve been using the ‘Web Developer Toolbar & Menu for Opera’ for about the last month and after being reminded today about how useful it is, I thought I should probably mention it for those that haven’t heard about it. This is an extremely useful set of toolbar modification to Opera to have a few very nice touches to it. For most of these tasks, there is a Firefox extension available, Web Developer, which does the job quite nicely.
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About Me
Security researcher, engineer and software developer with more than 20 years of experience.
Work: I primarily focus on application security, usable security, secure communications, and cryptography. I build and lead strong and dynamic teams, who cover all facets of security and privacy.
Writing: I write about my research, security in general, development and software design, and leadership through my blog, essays, and various publications. I also engage in some creating writing when I can.
Photography: I am a purist fine art photographer, working primarily in black & white, and focused on sharing new perspectives of the world. Limited edition prints of my work are available on my online gallery. I also have a background in photojournalism, and volunteer in this field when I can.