Chrome 27 stable released http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.ca/ some security fixes, (Tue, May 21st)

Johannes Ullrich — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:00:03 CDT

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Cascading Pattern – Machine Learning for Cascading and Hadoop

Paco Nathan — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:03 CDT

Announcing Pattern, a new library and framework that executes PMML workflows as Cascading applications on Apache Hadoop clusters.

Read more about it on the Pattern project page, signup for announcements on the mail list, or read the press release.

ISC StormCast for Tuesday, May 21st 2013 http://isc.sans.edu/podcastdetail.html?id=3320, (Tue, May 21st)

Johannes Ullrich — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:00:01 CDT

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Devs in the ‘Ditch Slides Posted

Johanna Rothman — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:00:02 CDT

I gave a talk at Devs in the ‘Ditch last week when I was in London. I posted the slides on slideshare: Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile.

The very nice people at 7digital made a video and posted it, too. If you can take the time, watch the entire video. Rob Bowyer gave a great talk about kanban and theory of constraints. My part about overcoming these three pitfalls starts at about 42 minutes in.

There are many other pitfalls to transition. This talk had just three of them: the stories are too big, you need experts to do the work, and you implement as layers instead of through the architecture.

I hope you enjoy the presentation and the video.

Bay Area Software Symposium - Jun 13 - 14, 2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:00:00 CDT

No Fluff Just Stuff is pleased to announce the Bay Area Software Symposium, Jun 13 - 14, 2013.

Catch these Featured Sessions

Getting the Most Out of Your IDE & Gradle
by Luke Daley and Peter Niederwieser

For many developers, the IDE is their daily command center. Making more functionality available in the IDE and generally automating IDE configuration saves valuable time during the day to day, but also importantly speeds up the on-boarding process for new developers. In this session we'll look at the tools and techniques available in Gradle for integrating with popular Java IDEs.

Modular Java Architecture - TODAY!
by Kirk Knoernschild

Modularity is coming to the Java platform! Java 8 will introduce the Jigsaw module system. OSGi is here today. Don’t wait to start designing modular software. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a framework or a new runtime to start building modular software applications. You can start today. Learn how!

Advanced Android
by Kenneth Kousen

Building on the basics, this talk will discuss how to use Android persistence, access remote services, perform asynchronous activities, work with notifications, and more.

Sysinternals Updates for Accesschk, Procdump, RAMMap and Strings http://blogs.technet.com/b/sysinternals/archive/2013/05/17/updates-accesschk-v5-11-procdump-v6-0-rammap-v1-22-strings-v2-51.aspx, (Mon, May 20th)

Johannes Ullrich — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:03 CDT

----------- Guy Bruneau https://github.com/jamesward/play-auto-refresh

Special thanks to Josh Suereth for helping me figure out the SBT magic.

Call for Papers - 4th annual Forensics and Incident Response Summit EU, (Wed, May 15th)

Johannes Ullrich — Sat, 18 May 2013 16:00:02 CDT

Gaelyk 2.0 is released

Guillaume LaForge — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:00:02 CDT

This week in #Scala (17/05/2013)

Jan Machacek — Sat, 18 May 2013 08:00:03 CDT

Welcome to another edition of #ThisWeekInScala. My choice chirp this week: @psnively: It’s OK to believe #scala is complex. The problem is believing #java, #csharp, #ruby, #python, #php, #javascript aren’t. …closely followed by: @jessitron: #Scala and F# are like … Read more →

SSL: Another reason not to ignore IPv6, (Fri, May 17th)

Johannes Ullrich — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:02 CDT

Currently, many public web sites that allow access via IPv6 do so via proxies. This is seen as ...(more)...

Day 15 of 100 Know You Are Managing Time to Market & How To Do It

Alan Shalloway — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:00:02 CDT

Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development

The purpose of development/IT is to deliver value quickly - not just for a team, but for the entire organization. If you reflect on this, it's not about going fast, it's about removing delays. Delays are typically waiting for folks, getting feedback late, detecting errors late, or just going to work on something else that has come up. Scrum, XP, and Kanban all, in their own way, focus on doing this - eliminating delays. However, instead of listing how these methods do it, let's look at fundamentally at what practice they use to do it. There are (at least) four ways to accomplish this:

remove delays in the workflow by making them visible on a value stream map (Lean)
manage work-in-progress to remove delays in the workflow (Lean, Kanban)
use cross-functional teams that self-organize to remove delays in the workflow (Lean, Scrum, XP)
focus on business value delivery - do what it takes to get the most important thing out the door fastest (Lean, Scrum, XP, Kanban)

These are obviously related, but since one-size does not fit all, if you don't know all of these methods you will certainly not be effective in certain situations.

Let's go through each of these briefly:

Remove delays in the workflow. Sometimes mapping out the workflow is all it takes to get to the root cause of problems. Attending to delays and thrashing at a macro level can lead to insights how to remove them. Acceptance Test-Driven Development is another method to remove delays.

Manage work-in-progress to remove delays in the workflow. Many (most?) delays in workflow are due to working on too many things. If you manage the size and number of things being worked on, the delays you want to eliminate will be reduced significantly.

Use cross-functional teams that self-organize to remove delays in the workflow. Scrum works, when it does, because its core mandate of a cross-functional team provides the structure from which to eliminate delays in workflow. Having all the people you need to get the job done makes it relatively straightforward to eliminate any delays in the workflow. Scrum hits the wall when it is attempted to be used across teams because it provides no viable mechanism to handle cross-team delays.

Focus on business value delivery - do what it takes to get the most important thing out the door fastest. If one focuses on delivering business value, one will do what it takes to:

eliminate delays in the workflow
will focus on the most important work - managing how much work is being done to not lose focus from the most important stuff
will have all the people necessary to get the job done quickly (notice what you do when you have a high priority, severity one issue

These are essential the first 3 items on the list.

The bottom line is don't get hung up on your method - understand why each can work and use them when that practice is most effective.

Want to learn how to do this in your company? Send me a note.

Al Shalloway
CEO, Net Objectives

Take the 100 in 100 Challenge. I'm committing to add one entry each day. I'm asking people to accept the challenge of reading them. If you accept this challenge, please enter a comment on the blog that started it all and tell me why you are taking up the challenge - that is, what you'd like to learn

Author:

alshall

e-netprotections.su ?, (Fri, May 17th)

Johannes Ullrich — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:00:12 CDT

Like with .biz, I sometimes have the impression that ...(more)...

ISC StormCast for Friday, May 17th 2013 http://isc.sans.edu/podcastdetail.html?id=3314, (Fri, May 17th)

Johannes Ullrich — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:00:09 CDT

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Unfolding brains at FITC Amsterdam

Denise Jacobs — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:00:02 CDT

There are some experiences that are so good that they set the bar for any other experience past or future to try to match or emulate. Facilitating my first full day workshop on creativity at FITC Amsterdam goes on record as being one of the best days of my life. Yes, it was that good. Seriously.

For starters, I was bolstered by the fact that I had been in contact with a few of the attendees beforehand. One woman emailed me in advance to tell me how excited she was about the workshop. Another gentleman flew in to Amsterdam for the day in from Madrid, Spain expressly to take the workshop (he further interviewed me afterwards to get Inside the Creativity), then left soon after it was over to catch his flight back home.

I was further encouraged by the number of attendees: 16, which was more than I thought would be there. Because the workshop focused on more “soft skills”, I figured that at a technical conference it would be the least well-attended out of all the workshops offered. Much to my surprise and delight, it turns out that The Unfolded Brain had the highest number of attendees of the four workshops that day.

There was minor hiccup to the day: my computer’s hard drive completely died at 6am, four hours before the workshop was about to start. However, my new method of preparation not only put me in good stead, but totally saved me. Having used the Post-it Big Pads to organize my ideas and work out the course flow, I was able to use them as my workshop notes with all of the reminders of the content that I wanted to cover, the exercises to do in class, and the practices for the attendees to work on at home.

The attendees were ready, eager to do some work, and eager for the content. In order to get an idea of what people were hoping to get out of the day, I had everyone write some of their goals for the workshop on post-it notes and put them at the front of their desks. Everyone had great ideas, and it was great for me to see them and know that my content was in alignment with what folks were looking to get out of the course.

After that, I intro-ed the content, and dove in with the first exercise. Despite not having any slides and doing the whole day “analog”, the information flowed and everyone delved into the assignments with gusto. Some of the exercises were individual, some required a partner, a few required small groups, and one exercise included everyone in the class at once.

For me, the experience was amazing. I felt very honored to be able to share my process for enhancing and expanding creative productivity. Workshops are truly my element, as it was through teaching a hands-on handmade herbal soapmaking workshop back in 1998 that showed me my gift for teaching and love for sharing practical information. And from the feedback, no slides was no problem:

“Nice job presenting ad-hoc (broken computer)”

“Great work solving the session without your computer.”

“Laptop was broke, so no slides could be shown, but I didnt miss them.”

At the end of the workshop, the students seemed buzzing with positivity and possibility, and many lingered past the end of the course to chat with each other and stay in the zone of the day. The blogger for the conference was one of the workshop participants, and he wrote up a really nice recap of the day for the conference site.

But that only partially explains why the day was so poignant for me. You know those moments when you have a vision of how your life could be better in the future than it is at the moment? Well, doing this work was part of a vision that came to me at the end of February 2010, when it became clear to me that I wanted to help people feel that incredible surge of energy that you get when you’ve created something amazing and have been in “the zone” creatively. This day and this workshop represented the culmination of three years of work in creating this experience, not just for myself, but for the people in the workshop as well. And seeing that I have the power to create something like this was phenomenal.

If you are wondering what happened to my computer, it turns out that had to spend all of the next day at the Apple Store working to get it fixed. But that did not impede on the great feelings that I had from the workshop the day before, which carried me through the rest of the week, right up to the next amazing experience that I had in Frankfurt, Germany the last week of February. That, however, is an entirely separate blog post.

Full disclaimer: This blog post is sponsored by Post-it Brand Big Pads.

ISC StormCast for Thursday, May 16th 2013 http://isc.sans.edu/podcastdetail.html?id=3311, (Thu, May 16th)

Johannes Ullrich — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:00:05 CDT

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