Discovering Myself

Most of my friends are not computer folk, so this should be interesting anyway.

In my opinion the best programmers are the laziest programmers. We’ll show some examples. A lazy programmer will find a way to program something once and reuse those methods throughout their entire program.

So write once, use many. That’s a pretty efficient solution for a lazy programmer. Now just to remember that you’ve created that method when you write your next application.

Oh here is another one, but somewhat controversial. If someone has already written it and I have their source, by golly it’s mine now bitches! Don’t recreate the wheel.

Now for real efficiency, if it can be done in 2 lines of code as opposed to 30, a lazy programmer will find a way to do it!

This error kept appearing when I was trying to install some RSS aggregation plugins for WordPress. Well I couldn’t figure out what this was occuring. So into debug mode I went.

I’m not seeing any native code errors. So I drill down and discover I’m running PHP4 with the usual plugins. So that all seems fine. But I figure, what the hell I can just point the PHP handler to the PHP5 instance that’s installed. So I set the .htaccess to:
# PHP5
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

That solved the problem, so I assume that there was an extension that wasn’t working properly in the 4.x instance of php.

People Shapes that are good for use case diagrams and other process flow diagrams:
Visio People Shapes

MojoKid writes “According to a release issued by Rocky Mountain Tracking, an 18-year old man, Shaun Malone, was able to successfully contest a speeding ticket in court using the data from a GPS device installed in his car. This wasn’t just any old make-a-left-turn-100-feet-ahead-onto-Maple-Street GPS; this was a vehicle-tracking GPS device — the kind used by trucking fleets — or in this case, overprotective parents. The device was installed in Malone’s car by his parents, and the press release makes no mention if the teenager knew that the device was installed in his vehicle at the time.”

Read more of this story

This is an interesting article that I saw on slashdot. I wonder what this will mean for the future of processor competition.

Barence writes to mention that after seeing almost $1.2 billion in second quarter losses, AMD’s CEO has resigned. Stepping up to fill his shoes will be Dirk Meyer, previous company president and COO. “Only two years ago, the company held a processor performance lead and was making serious inroads into Intel’s market. However, AMD failed to keep pace with Intel’s Core technology, and it once again surrendered its performance crown at the dawn of the multicore era. Those problems were exacerbated by the bungled launch of the Barcelona processors, which prompted Ruiz to make a frank public apology last December.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ok, I’ve currently tried to roll out this product at my company.  We have around 15K endpoints that need this software package on them.  I will outline all of the problems that we’ve had.  Apparently they want the consumer to diagnose and debug the problems for them.  My response was, we’ll pull your product if you don’t get it fixed.

I’m curious as to how many clients they’ve lost because of this product.  I’m sure it’s quite a few.  The thing is that they get a company into a contract agreement and then they are stuck with a crappy product for the duration of the contract.  Well, I’m here to say, there are other companies that have better products who will buy out your contracts.

Issues (This is all with the latest version of the product.):

• Scans tax the CPU and hard drive so much that they either overheat or make the device unusable for the duration of the scan.
• If the computer does not have network access a liveupdate process will run out of control and eventually grind the system to a halt.
• Outlook attachments randomly blocked.  They said most of their clients were seeing this problem and they asked us to ship them an example laptop.  I said, fuck you, these are my laptop, you ship me a tech to look at it.
• Application and Device Control blocks share viewing and printer viewing on remote sites.  I couldn’t even figure out why this was even looking at this traffic let alone blocking it.
• Cannot configure scans to scan one hard drive, only approved Symantec Locations.  Go ahead, try to configure a scheduled scan to scan only drive C or something specific.  You can’t, it just isn’t an option.  What brain dead sloth designed this shit?
• These are just a few of the issues we’ve recieved during a small pilot, we’ve stopped the pilot and deployment.

These issues make me look bad as a Security Engineer.  I’m ready to switch to a different product to get the promised functionality.  The concept is great, the execution is horrible.  How the fuck did Gartner rate this highly?  It’s undeployable!

I’m calling Sophos right now, McAfee kind of sucks.  Maybe CA or TrendMicro have good enterprise solutions as well?