Big Brother? Sits right on your mobile
[The image above has nothing to do with this post, but it seemed to be fitting, given the latest developments. This post is all about trust] In this age of free(mium), it’s common knowledge that you pay with your privacy. Facebook is the best (or should I say worst) example of the dance around your [...]
How and why common sense will beat REST
In my previous post I described how REST would replace SOAP. If you paid close attention you will have noticed that I actually didn’t say anything in favour of REST, but everything at the expense of SOAP. Because it indeed seems like REST will be the new SOAP – which is in contradiction with the [...]
GoDaddy… Go… Gone
Today the Godaddy servers have been hit by a simple DDOS – a distributed denial of service involving a few dozen clients or servers that fire off hundreds or even thousands of requests a second at their servers. It’s a simple attack, and very effective. It’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, standing in the [...]
Learn To Fail And Fail To Learn
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education” – Mark Twain In a casual conversation with a dad of an eight-year old over a little league baseball game on a breezy bay area evening, who also happens to be an elementary school teacher, he told me that teaching cursive writing to kids isn’t [...]
Twitter needs a radical change of security NOW
I wrote a post a while back titled Your Twitter security is an egg, not an onion, explaining how Twitter only has one front door, like your house, and if you let people in, you let them in – after which they have access to everything, including your Direct Messages. A few months after that, [...]
Cloud Computing in Education
I was up late last night talking to some of my very old contracting buddies from a long time in my past. We were talking about the adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise, and the influence that is having on the ability to hire employees who really get cloud computing, virtualization, security, cryptography, and [...]
Come On Silicon Valley, We Can Provide a Better Rx for Jobs!
Fortune magazine has an article running that Techmemed about some advice Barrack Obama is getting about jobs from Silicon Valley Heavyweights like Kleiner VC John Doerr and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. They’re all about Education and Immigration Visa Reform as the path to creating jobs, along with plugs along the way for their own ventures. Here [...]
How Tech People Can Make a Difference in the Lives of Under-Privileged Children
I’d like to start by asking each of you to consider helping under-privileged children in America get a little bit more than they have today. Sure, you can give a small amount of money. Even $10. Please. It’s better than zero. You can combine that with supporting Fred & Joanne Wilson. (if you click no [...]
Comments make your code alive. Otherwise, it’s dead
I had a small discussion about code and comments with Bob MacNeal. Bob thinks that Commented out code is the same as a comment – Litter. Don’t litter. I strongly disagree, although we had a nice conversation. It turned out that @MartijnLinssen I’m an average coder at best, but I like clean code. I’ve made [...]
Education Bubble maybe or maybe not – the siren call of Peter Thiel
I will agree with Peter Thiel that education as we know it is hard to justify the inputs versus the outputs, especially the costs of education. I have attended many colleges over the years, graduated from two of them, have an advanced degree and feel good about it. The degree has helped me with employment, [...]
School as a Service: Learning Anywhere Everywhere
While we are all familiar with the cloud offering a platform for Software as a Service, Internet as a Service, and a host of other ways of supporting continuous and scalable operations, an interesting idea has cropped up lately, and that is School as …
PRCCDC 2011 it is that time of year for all Student Cyber Defenders to face down hackers
If you are not aware of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, this is a good place to start. If you are aware, then you might know that the regional competitions are underway, and this year I have been very involved with one awesome team from Highline Community College with a huge assist from CityU of [...]
Should instructors weed students out of programs based on ethics?
While the subject of teaching ethics is all the rage in business education, with many good ideas coming out of that realm, it might also be time to take a look at other professions that can stand to learn from what is happening in business schools. While my focus has been on information security, maybe [...]
The disconnect between education and employees
A recent network world article brought up the disconnect between students, employers and colleges. Realistically education is a tri-parte agreement between students who want to generally learn something useful for their future, educators who need to stay up on top of the technology so that they can teach it to students, and employers who will hire [...]
Purchasing influence, followers and popularity
Over on Techcrunch they have a message about using Amazon Mechanical Turk to help a person raise their influence, followers, or general popularity. Unfortunately most of the conversation centers on Quora, which is an awesome question answer system (until it exploded in popularity) that gave people an indirect link to people who were actually doing [...]
