Recently in My Life Category

Per findingada, this is my Ada Lovelace tribute. My exemplar of women excelling in technology is one of the people who got me interested in - inspired me to take up - technology as a career. Despite not being a system administrator or a techie or a programmer or a designer herself, she nevertheless set a good example for me and, I believe, a couple of generations of young women she taught to use computers to solve problems.

This woman's name is Dian, although when we talk on our weekly telephone calls, I call her Mum.

My mother isn't any of what we would recognize as one of the traditional technical roles. She has a PhD in quantitative genetics and is a professor of animal science, but some of my earliest memories as a child involve going with her to the computer lab at the University of Guelph. She would set me up on a keypunch machine with a few cards while she did her own computer runs and other work.

When we moved to Nova Scotia, she helped to set up a computer lab at the Agricultural College, and one of the courses she used to teach involved computerized statistical analysis. I spent parts of a few summers helping her to run the lab, and got my start in security there too; I found some of the lab machines had been infected using Stoned while chasing down what I thought was a bug in a program I'd written to do hardware inventories.

I found out later that that class was infamous among some of her students; it was required for those who wanted to do the pre-vet program, and when I ran a business in the same town in which my mother teaches, I had a veterinary clinic as a client. The staff there had mostly done their pre-vet at the AC. Their expressions became very guarded when I told them who my mother was, and they cautiously expressed the opinion that the class was good but extremely tough, my mother a tough but fair professor, and that while they didn't come out of the class loving computer analysis, they did respect the machine as a tool.

When I was 12 or 13, I came home one day to find my parents formatting floppy disks for their latest acquisition, a Commodore PC-10II. I know now that it was an 8088 at 4.77MHz with 640KB of RAM and a CGA adapter, but at the time I was slightly disappointed that it was not a Commodore 64. Nevertheless, I played around with it, and when I took a computer class in high school and learned some Pascal, my parents bought me a copy of Turbo Pascal 5.0. My mother encouraged me to continue programming and bought me upgrades to TP 5.5 and 6.0 Pro. I spent my allowance on and received for Christmas and birthday presents several programming books and tools: Pascal, x86 assembler, graphics, QuickC, Turbo Assembler, and probably lots of others I've forgotten. I was never an expert user of any of these tools, but I did learn a lot, went on to CS at UNB, failed out, and now I work in IT anyway.

I don't know that my mother will ever win any awards for women in technology, but to me she proves that you don't need to be a hardcore coder or a sysadmin to be successful at using computers. I hope her students learned that too, while they struggled with their analyses. She is definitely responsible for helping to put me where I am now.

When you were in high school or university or working your first job, you knew one of those guys, right? You may be working or going to school with one of them now. You know the kind I mean. He's not happy unless he's got everybody's attention. He doesn't care how he gets it, either.

One day he's making fun of the boss or the kid with the cane. Next day he's telling off-colour jokes and everybody shuffles uncomfortably back to work. Then he makes a point of stalking off and being by himself, only to return with the same shit-eating grin he's always worn and pretending nothing happened.

He goes up to that line everybody just knows where it is, pauses to make sure everybody's looking, and then flings himself bodily over it. The hell of it is, he's a pretty smart guy and everybody knows he'd be just that much better if he kept his trap shut and just worked like everybody else.

I knew a fellow like that in the Reserves. Smart, capable. Not the best at anything, but always top 10. The kind of guy any unit would have been happy to have. Except for this one thing: he couldn't resist. He just couldn't help himself from pushing that one extra step.

Maybe I'd have felt differently about him if I hadn't been one of the smaller guys he tried to pick on. I fed him his testicles once - just before a graduation parade, with us in full dress uniform - and he whined that I fought dirty. Pretty rich, coming from a guy who outweighed me by about 80 pounds and jumped me from behind. It wasn't enough, so later I had to demonstrate how his nose only wasn't broken because I'm a nice guy who also doesn't want to go up on charges. Those retaliatory penalties are a bitch. If the boys were sitting around bullshitting and telling jokes, he always had a "good" one about Jews or Muslims or blacks or anybody else.

He was a good field soldier, maybe even a great one. He still is for all I know, but I also know I didn't want him anywhere near me and I'm ashamed that he wore the same uniform I did. If he's in Afghanistan now, I hope for the locals' sake he finally learned his lesson.

You know the kind of guy I'm talking about. You know who I'm talking about now. Why keep giving him what he wants?

CRC Error, and I'm on it. It's profane, irreverent, and probably would disappoint my mother.

On the other hand, it was fun to make, even if the first ep involved us BSing for 3 hours only to find that finchy's recording crapped out and only got 20-some minutes, he couldn't find his headphones, the power went out at CBass's house, and I had a mic fail for the first 20 minutes or so of "recording."

Hopefully we'll be able to release another one soon (in the next week or so) but in the meantime if you want one or two cheap laughs - hey, my wife thought it was vaguely amusing, if pointless - why don't you just go ahead and check it out?

If you try and like it, let me/us know. If you hated it, well, let us have it with both barrels, reload, and do it again. We don't cry easily.

Not sure how eBay know I'm a student, albeit part-time, but maybe they just blasted this out to everybody. Nevertheless, shows the perception (and maybe reality) of undergrads. The email included links to things that presumably students want, and it's an ordered list:
1. Laptops
2. Backpacks
3. Cell Phones
4. Sneakers
5. iPods
6. Jeans
7. Xbox 360
8. Shirts
9. Textbooks
10. PC Components

Hint: one of those items is actually directly related to going back to school, and another is handy for containing the first. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't see how buying things for an Xbox 360 has anything at all with actual schooling.

And yes, I fully understand the need for hobbies outside of school that aren't competitive drinking, but don't you need those hobbies when you're not in school too? Stupid marketing.

This is part of an email I sent to a security mailing list to which I subscribe, but really, the answer applies to any walk of life. The question is, "How do I get started?"

----

Really though, the answer to "how do I get started in network
security" is the same as it is to virtually any hobby or career: just
dive in and start doing it. You'll know you're doing it right when
you're learning stuff. You'll know you're doing it wrong if you're
not having fun. If you're unwilling or unable to just grab some
hardware and start hacking, this area is not for you - the same can be
said for any skill. If that sort of thing doesn't appeal to you, then
this sort of thing will not appeal to you, and you're wanting to get
into it for the wrong reasons, which never ends well.

People with skills are rarely willing to just braindump what they
know. It's a lot of work for honestly very little return. If you
want to learn skills from others, best way to do it is to poke at
something a bit, then when you get stuck ask somebody else. Say "I'm
trying to do X and I tried Y and Z but they didn't work, here's what
happened... any ideas?" Hopefully they'll know, will give you some
hints, and that will be sufficient, then off you go again til you get
stuck again. If you get really stuck, back up, go around, try
something else for a while, get some fresh perspective.

There's no magic bullet, no set of books you can read that will make
you an expert at *anything*, and security work is no exception. The
secret is putting in the time and effort; that's all, that's it.

----

Stephen King says it best.

Academic offices.

Ahh, I can remember the offices of a few of my own professors.  Always fascinating places to visit, once I got over the innate fear reaction.  I used to love my mother's too.  Visiting other offices, there's lots to see, especially books on shelves.  Nowadays I look to see what's on the shelves that *isn't* directly related to their field.  Professors being who and what they are, it's actually disappointingly rare to see much along those lines, but I look anyway.  I also like to see how people lay things out, to see if I can scoop any ideas for my own disaster.  Unfortunately, few people have the sort of work I do, so that's difficult.

In my current job, I see a great many offices of faculty members, but more importantly, I have my own.  Many of my friends are in industry and have, at best, cubes of their very own.  Some people I know on campus have offices, but have to vacate them periodically.  At my last job, I started in a real office, then got moved to a desk in a corner of cubeland, then I got my own cube walls, then my cube got doubled up, then I lost a bit more space - eventually winding up in a 5'x5' square with shelving higher than I could reach and a pair of CRTs gobbling up most of the desk space.  I won't say that's *the* reason I ditched, but it sure didn't hurt either.

A good-sized office is a nice thing to have, and is one of the things I appreciate about my current job.  If I changed jobs, I suspect it would be something I'd miss a lot.

Tangentially related to a paper I wrote for my cognitive science seminar, I've been collecting references to stories on CBC, CTV, and other outlets that allow commenting. What I'm interested in is the popular reaction to matters related to what can loosely be described as justice. For instance, I've bookmarks to stories on Robert Pickton, Thomas Svekla, street racers who've killed people, Gregory Despres's trial, some child pornography cases, and so on.

Besides the obvious effect of the stories themselves - litanies of the indignities which we visit upon one another with depressing regularity - I've found a couple of other things. First is an extension of that thought; it's similarly depressing how people who are presumably largely Canadian citizens, my peers, presumably fairly well-educated and in the top 10th or 20th percentile worldwide, folks who are well-enough off to have both the free time and access to read and comment on these stories online, are able to so casually dismiss and pass judgement on other human beings with a minimum of information. Second is now every time I see a story that's likely to get such comments, I mentally grin and rub my hands in anticipation. Then I feel guilty, because each one of those stories means something horrible has happened to one or more human beings, and chances are something horrible is going to happen to at least one more person.

I have a rough idea where I'd like to go with this stuff, and I even have a rough idea about the direction in which I'd like to see our society headed. But given that we live in a democracy, it's fairly unlikely we'd even come close to what I'd like to see, at least in my lifetime.

Just submitted to my university's opinion website:

----

Many a criticism of universities starts with something like "You'd think a university...", so much so that it's a bit of a joke, but here goes.

You'd think that a university would be committed to things like ensuring a cleaner environment and enabling its employees and students to do the same. You'd think that would go double for an institution with an entire faculty devoted to Environmental Sciences. Apparently, you'd be wrong.

A co-worker of mine car-pools to work from another city with up to 4 other people in the car. To even things out, they rotate vehicles. So far so good. From the point of view of Parking Services, however, they must represent a loss of income, not sensible environmentalism and fiscal responsibility. They are still required to each get a parking pass at full price for their individual vehicles, despite the fact that it is people like them that allow PS to oversubscribe their lots and make still more money off the available spots.

I understand the importance of the revenue stream that selling parking spots represents to the university. But in a city where it seems that summer days mean smog alerts almost as often as not, it seems to me that Waterloo could lead the way in this sort of thing rather than simply maintaining the status quo. It's still worse when the university seems determined to put a building over top of every parking lot while simultaneously expanding the number of people on campus.

People like my co-worker could be -- and are -- helping the university out in this respect, and are getting nothing in return, even when getting something would cost the institution nothing at all.

----

Some afterthoughts: No matter where you are in your organization, no matter what you do, you are also marketing. You are marketing yourself, and you are marketing your department. When my co-worker gets told "we never thought of that, and are unlikely to consider it," what he's really being told is really "I'm sorry you feel that way, now please go away and let me go back to what I consider to be my real job."

If you sit at a public-facing desk, you're a marketer. If you respond to email from people outside your department, you're a marketer. If you answer your telephone, you're a marketer. If you tell the people who spend their valuable time to try to contact you that they should go away -- either explicitly or through your actions -- you're doing a poor marketing job, and those people will wonder why your department exists. I shouldn't have to say that's not a good situation in which to find yourself.

I had plans this weekend to collate my notes from the conference, finish off a few more posts, upgrade my webserver, and maybe work some hockey stats.

Instead, we took our eldest cat to the vet twice today; the first time to have her looked at as she'd been moving slowly and wasn't her usual self, the second time a few hours later, to leave her behind for good. I guess the other stuff will wait.

A couple of nights ago, we had a pretty yummy meal of salmon with cabbage and curry.  Normally I despise cabbage, and curry I can take or leave - although I find myself liking it more as I get older, so perhaps I've sufficiently cauterized my taste buds with coffee and beer now.  Linda originally found the recipe on a vegetarian site, printed it off, and promptly forgot the URL, but this is pretty close.

Quick to prep, quick to cook, and in our experience, quick to eat.