mobrec

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This meme just keeps hanging on. If you are at all familiar with the node.js/io.js 'forking' schism, this video is particularly funny.

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Happy Birthday, Cincinnati. A quick tour through all things Cincinnati.

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I am just blown away that there are employees that would sell a user's password for $150USD. Ii am even more blown away by the fact that they would admit to it.

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This is a handy new development that allows you to run Linux (Crouton) in a window on a Chromebook. It also addresses some of the difficulties of copy and paste from ChromeOS and Crouton which is something I have been missing very much.

Obviously, you can run Crouton without this plugin by switching between full screen Crouton and full screen ChromeOS, but these just feels more seemless and integrated.

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I chuckled my way through this post on 'Why SOAP lost' because it seems to be missing some fundamental observations.

SOAP (like Java) was designed for structured use in well designed systems. most developers shy away from anything structured. It gets in the way of just writing code (or more frequently, downloading code and pasting into the editor). Much better to use JSON and write a bunch of validation code than to use SOAP/XML and re-use existing robust, well tested parsers and validators. I know, I am making a big assumption there – that a developer would actually write validation code. The more ad hoc the development process, the more 'agile' it is and that is good, right? Ask your friendly neighborhood QA and operations people about the value of optimizing for slap-dash development versus designing for sustainability, consistency, uptime and performance.

XML is 'much harder to read' than JSON? Right. Give someone a JSON document with 2-3 levels of nesting and an array or two and see how much easier they think JSON is. XML can be verbose, but that is for the purpose of clarity. Oh, and kudos for adding the line breaks in front of the namespace declarations to make your example XML look more 'verbose'.

I'm not sure I understand the comment about SOAP usage of HTTP POST being a hardship because it can't be tested in a browser. Easily solved by using something like the POSTman plugin in your browser. And I suppose the author is one of the service designers who doesn't use anything but HTTP GET and returns everything (including errors) with an HTTP status of 200. Because, you know, that is easier – especially when your production environment is a browser and not a server or something exotic like that.

The last set of bullet items in the post is missing a little something as well:

Laziness, when it is the primary decision criteria, optimizes for development and sacrifices everything else. That is like optimizing for 5% or less of the lifecycle of that code. Just dumb. Be a nice person and drink your steaming cup of STFU when your YAGNI snark causes 20 hours of production downtime a month because the code has no design rigor behind it and certainly doesn't take supportability concerns into consideration.

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[caption id=“attachment_783” align=“alignnone” width=“660”] YubiKey Neo[/caption]Outstanding detailed article on using two-factor authentication with the Mac OS X operating system. Note that there is a lot of good follow up in the comments section as well.

I bought a yubikey neo back in October and have been using it with Google's U2F implementation. I think that this is a smart way to go security-wise and I am glad to see that Google is making it easier to take advantage of. You can also opt for the less expensive yubikey standard if you don't have a need for the Near Field Communications (NFC) capability on the yubikey.

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I found this posting to be a bit swear-y (you've been warned), but otherwise on the money.

The final paragraph nails it (I have definitely seen my share of those 'success' messages:

Above all else, have a wonderful holiday season and give your teams a break until the code freeze is lifted in mid-January. Then you can get back to shoving Agile on people, making them work 60 hours a week again and then having your directors send “we did it the Agile way!!!!” success messages after the project you executed took production offline, took twice as long to finish and cost 3 times as much.

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Happy New Year! 2014 was filled with ups and downs (as to be expected). Hopefully, 2015 will see projects successfully completed and new directions explored. Coming into the new year with a bit of flu has been kind of a drag, but things should start picking up again in a few days.

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It seems like only yesterday it was 2014...

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