$: Tsky Blog
"Delivering thoughts on living with electro-connection-disorder since 1980."
Hey we're in June already?
2013-06-06 (11:23:39)
It's been a crazy few weeks of developing software and getting hardware provisioned along with a bazillion other life things that happen. Spent a weekend up in Edinburgh and took the kids to the zoo - managed to book in to see the Pandas there which was excellent. Great to see them so close and I don't imagine we'll have the privilege much longer depending on how the breeding programs work out.
Work on the CRM system is still progressing well and there's a heck of a lot of work gone into what I've built. The new designs the team put together and are skinning it with look super slick. Gives you a sense of massive achievement when you see it working.
Been working on some home projects in the odd spare moment and I'm working on a nice safe blogging platform for families where children (like my big lad) want to start learning about publishing information on the Internet in a safe environment.
I'll be making the source code for it available once I've completed the base build of the system.
Not long until I head to South Africa for a conference - seems like five minutes ago we were saying "next year we might look at Sun City". A lot has happened in a year.
Hit the eight year mark with the wedding anniversary this week which almost caught us both off guard. Love my missis and am glad to have shared the last 13 years with her.
Been having to draw on knowledge gained from network management and programming in the last couple of weeks to solve some issues and do some development and looks like I might have to draw on my teaching/training skills in the coming weeks too. Glad to have had a varied background though at times wish I'd specialised sooner with the programming ! Glad for the up-coming Symfony training...
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Refresh Teesside - May 2013
2013-05-17 (22:34:57)
Wow, we're storming through the year and the May episode of Refresh Teesside was another excellent evening filled with discussion and networking. I had the opportunity to open up the five minute talk slots with a whistle-stop tour of why I open-sourced Kongreg8 many moons ago.
It's always a privilege to speak at events even though the nerves tried to get the better of me (knowing and respecting the other speakers). I think it went well, seemed to be fairly well received and a few positive tweets back. Amazing to see how the event has moved on over the last year.
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Squeeze the features
2013-05-14 (10:49:24)
It's that point in a project where you start to realise how many extra features you really need to shoe-horn into it in order to give it that sparkly edge. I'm always mindful of the "ship half of it that looks great" instead of "ship all of it that looks like it's half done" mentality. Still, the urge to feature creep is there...
Been a busy few weeks and lots of code has passed out of the brain through the fingers onto the digital page. Looking forward to getting some real feedback on the built system soon from the guys in our London offices.
Also, this week I've been roped into speaking at Refresh Teesside again - really looking forward to sharing some of the background to Kongreg8, though I am a little nervous to be talking about a codebase I'm not massively happy about at present. It represents a learning curve on the beta release and the stable release I'm building is completely different in setup and coding style.
Still, you live and learn and move on to the next project!
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Why data retention policies matter
2013-05-07 (09:18:37)
This weekend I received an email from Facebook informing me I'd reactivated my account and welcoming me back. The trouble is, I hadn't reactivated my account - someone else had. I can probably trace this back to the fact when I "deleted" my account with Facebook it had shared a password with my LinkedIn account. LinkedIn had their password database swiped (and thanks to the fact it wasn't seeded, MD5 cracking could smash it open and allow people to try all the major systems with your email address and password).
Now here's the thing - I deactivated the account THREE YEARS AGO. I deleted most of the content from it (as much as you can, given they don't really delete things) and then told them in the deactivate system that I no longer wanted it, I was not happy with the security policies and I no longer wanted the account.
This should be enough to delete the account from the system. However, in the terms and conditions there is a data retention policy. This means, thanks to their lackadaisical attitude to allowing people straight in to your account years after you've deleted it, if anyone can guess an old password or you've had an old password cracked by another online services breach, your account can be reactivated and data stolen, modified or friends details spammed as if coming from yourself.
In my instance, I didn't have a lot of data on there and I don't tend to store important information online. Each of my service types is segregated in passwords and complexity levels - this was one of the lowest levels (thankfully) from many moons ago. Imagine if I had card details stored on there for app purchases or if this had been the common password for all my accounts? Gee, thanks Facebook. Gee, thanks LinkedIn.
Yes, security is also down to me and selecting sufficiently complex passwords - but what good is that if my MD5 hash is snatched from your systems and then smashed open!?
Here's a data retention policy for you: When I say "I don't want my data stored anymore. I don't want this account anymore. I don't trust your data storage policies" DELETE MY FRIGGIN DATA.
It boils down to this: Don't be an asshole to your customers. Oh, but I'm forgetting, we're the commodity - not the customer as far as these online services go. Herein lies the problem - if you're the pig ready for slaughter and sale to the wolves, who really cares about you?
Three years ago I deleted my Facebook account. I couldn't care less that I don't have one and you shouldn't feel you have to have one either. You are not a commodity. You are not a number.
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Lines of code?
2013-04-29 (17:03:05)
After a bit of tomfoolery with the command line and some checking on the interwebs - I managed to put together a nice little line of code that checks how many lines of PHP you've put together (useful for checking or pulling into subsequent graphs of development with cron jobs). Perhaps it might come in handy for you as well:
find . -name "*.php" -exec cat {} \; | wc -lObviously, you can change the file type it's looking for but this does the job for me while I try and keep a track of how much I've put together on a daily basis.
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