the bofe blog

Murray State University – Commencement List 2006 [pdf]

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Mercury News has a piece about how 2004’s EA Spouse story has actually made changes in EA’s company policy along with other companies.

I love reading stories like these. The once voiceless now have a voice that the globe can listen to through weblogs.

After voicing my disdain with Corporate America to my father, I was invited me to read a book entitled The Peter Principle.

Wikipedia provides a quick overview:

In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.

Ouch.

With further elaboration:

The employee’s incompetence is not necessarily exposed as a result of the higher-ranking position being “more difficult” — it may be simply that the position is different from the position in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different skills, which the employee may not possess.

Most people don’t realize when they’ve achieved their peak. This is very evident in entertainment too: Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart, etc. The only ‘big name’ I can think of that’s bowed out gracefully semi recently is Jay-Z with The Black Album.

I think it’s an issue of humility. Who doesn’t think they could always do better? Hopefully the book will answer a few of my questions. I’ts a good read so far.

From Everything2:

In Tom Clancy’s Sum of all Fears, a ‘shake’ is defined as a unit of time approximately 10 nanoseconds; named after the biblical passage that says that armageddon will come in “three shakes of a lamb’s tail.” Thirty nanoseconds are required for a nuclear weapon to get to critical mass.

Clancy is awesome. I was just thinking about this earlier today when I was considering talking to my MGT590 presentation’s “public speaking evaluator” I was considering letting her know that my hands shake all the time, because she had mentioned that in the “DON’TS” of public speaking and I don’t really want to get low marks from her just because of it… but who cares. I’m graduating! Plus, I won’t have that opportunity in “the real world” so why should I try and take it now?

Now for the geek portion of today’s post:

Employers are stupid if they think some e-stalking is a viable way of screening an employee.

• How easy would it be for anyone to make a myspace account that had a publically available picture that was completely job-search suicide?
• How reputable is the website?

Anyone can claim they are anyone on the web. Do employers not realize this when they’re snooping around?

Here’s my geek roundup:

Scoble posted quite a manifesto today.

It’s encouraging to see such forward thought from Scoble. I especially enjoyed his piece on “Sparkle” versus “Expression Interactive Designer”. It’s especially interesting seeing his view on publicizing raises. Why not? I’ve never really understood the big deal about not knowing how much others make. If it is obviously wrong, the employee will be encouraged to leave or confront management about compensation. It just makes sense.

Tab Handling in Textareas

FINALLY! I’m so sick and tired of moving code from a text editor to textareas for decent indentation.

MySpace is a Click Factory

The most interesting post of the day: does having a user friendly website decrease your potential revenue? MySpace’s is horrendous from a usability standpoint BUT that allows it to display more ads. Ouch. I like to think having an easier to use site would increase overall usage, but I could be wrong.

Take care.

Whew, that was exhausting. A four hour marathon of coding co-learning the prototype library’s ins and outs with my buddy Derek led to some pretty significant strides.

That was pretty exhausting. It’s been a little while since I had a geek marathon after working out and a fully day of class and work.

FINISHED FUNCTIONS: INSERT, DELETE, BUILD_FORM, BUILD_FORM_FIELD, GET_FIELD_DATA, GET_TABLE_DATA and SANITIZE are all done. Lots of little things are covered in the function—but there are still a lot of details that can be added. When I start working with this library I’ll know what I need to add to the next revision.

Next week:Data Selection.

I’m such a geek.

The new, highly anticipated TOOL album is being released in the beginning of May. It’s called 10,000 days. At first I thought, wow… I didn’t know it had been that long since they released Lateralus. Then I read the Wikpedia Entry…

As Keenan explains on commentary on aMOTION, his mother suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and wheelchair-bound. The length of time between her paralysis and her death was 27 years, or approximately 10,000 days.

Ouch.

From a security standpoint, I should have unique usernames and passwords for 40+ services. Think about all of the services you’ve used that/those good password(s) on—the last.fm, myspace, facebook, itunes, xanga, livejournal, gmail, hotmail, aim, msn, icq, yahoo im, all of the forums you may be a part of, del.icio.us, blogger… oh and if you’re of the techie persuasion… your active directory password, your shell passwords, your ftp passwords, your email accounts, the databases, mailing lists, gallery installs… the list can go on forever. Most of us aren’t oblivious enough to write the passwords down—or worse, create a text file with a list of our accounts/urls and passwords… let’s face it:

By using a fixed set of passwords that do not fluctuate, we have created a gaping bottleneck which could serve as a gateway to a complete identity breach.

I’m sure as hell not smart enough to remember a strong unique password for each service that requires a username/password set. If you’re that smart, you should be reading books about String Theory or a writing really complex musical piece. Unique Strong passwords are a nightmare to manage! Any way you slice it, even if you have a ‘password convention’ you still aren’t being as secure if you had completely independent passwords.

Enter password management software. Enter Defygo.

Defygo is software designed to make your security easier to obtain. The software’s name is a play on the Latin word for security. It’s been pretty awesome watching this piece be developed. The staff at e-liberty has been hard at work on this project for a while.

The feature of Defygo I use the most is a roaming identity management. It’s a password vault that is web based. The obvious question here is “should I trust it?”—let’s just say if there is a compromise of their technology it could be considered a miracle in my eyes. Other features include email encryption, file encryption, and a secure buddy listed messaging program (cryptograms).

A little more on Defygo’s security…All data is all transferred over SSL—- everything is encrypted. I was lucky enough to get to see their master database from phpMyAdmin and it looked like I was staring at The Matrix. I could go on more about how secure this program is, but I honestly do not understand all of the security behind it. If you’re a security guru, Defygo’s Tech Specs should appease your needs.

So…if you’re not a super genius and you value your digital identity, give Defygo a try.

Oh, and for the developers out there: The Frontend is done in VB.NET (maybe this will make Scoble happy) and the backend operates on PHP/MySQL (which makes me very happy).

AJAX has a lot of buzz these days. The UI quirks it provides are simply superior than a typical app. Here it is working well with little educational presentations…

The cast…

• Prototype.js – makes the javascript/AJAX super sexy and easy
• Behaviour.js – makes the XHTML super sexy

The purpose:

• To illustrate to end-users how basic one way encryption (hashing) works.

PS: Any WordPress 2.0 users out there should consider installing the Tiger Admin Theme for WordPress.

My roommate Matt passed this link along to me. It takes a while to load, but it’s definitely worth the wait.

Wikipedia: Featured pictures visible

Some amazing photos/animations on this slice of Internet.