Over the last couple months I have had many similar conversations on enterprise application security: customers identify gaps in their security program, are unaware of the availability of certain types of solutions, or simply don’t believe that certain solutions deliver their advertised value. But I expect issues when speaking to a company who wants to implement advanced security on a Hadoop database, where technology simply may not exist to deliver the security and performance required. It is…
Adrian is out, so Rich and Mike cover the latest Amazon Web Services news as their big re:Invent conference closes in. We start with the new Frankfurt datacenter, and how a court case involving Microsoft could kill off the future of all US-based cloud companies (it’s always the little things). Then we discuss directory services in the cloud, and how this indicates increasing cloud adoption and maturity at a pace we really haven’t ever seen before.
Lots of folks talk lovingly about their first computers. Mine was a Timex Sinclair I ran through my 10” black-and-white TV. But that wasn’t the first computer I played with. My Dad was pretty early into the word processing world as part of his law practice. So when we went to the computer show down in NYC and checked out all the new wares, I was like a kid in a candy store.
Rich here.
Last night I arrived home around 11pm from the totally awesome SecTor conference in Toronto. It took about 11 hours to wend my way home through the air system, which has a certain beauty.
There were always reasons I wasn’t a runner. I was too big and carried too much weight. I was prone to knee pain. I never had good endurance. I remember the struggle when I had to run 3 miles as a pledge back in college. I finished, but I was probably 10 minutes behind everyone else. Running just wasn’t for me. So I focused on other methods of exercise. I lifted weights until my joints let me know that wasn’t a very good idea. Then I spent a couple years doing too many 12-ounce curls and eating…
It won’t happen to you, right? After every breach you see all sorts of former employees and others crawl out from under their various rocks to talk about how screwed-up their former employer was. And how the breach was inevitable. It is a bit comical at this point. The latest example is a bunch of former Home Depot employees talking about their old shop.
This is off topic, but this post from Daniel Miessler is a great example of how I want to reorient my world view.
Ever tried to count to a billion? Don’t bother. The average human lifespan is about 2.5 billion seconds, so you’d waste half your life trying. But that may help put into perspective Databrick’s latest announcement that they were able to sort 10 trillion records in four hours with the Spark platform. That’s three times faster than the previous record, with one-tenth the number of server nodes. Or perhaps you noticed that Amazon added full JSON support to DynamoDB, so you can easily inject JSON…
A few years ago I had to stop competing. The constant need to win – whatever that even meant – was making me unhappy. Even when things were going well, I found some reason to feel like a loser. So I got off the hamster wheel and put myself in positions where I wasn’t really competing against others. I am always trying to improve, but I stopped doing that in terms of others. Set a goal. Work toward it. Adjust as needed.
Writing is an oddly physical act.
Technically you are just sitting there, clanking away on the keyboard, while your bottom loses circulation and gets sore. (Maybe I need a new chair.) But keeping your brain running at the right tempo for effective writing involves a complicated dance of nutrition, sleep, physical movement, and environmental management.