Author: cosmo

It’s like internet armageddon these days. Amazon’s cloud services went down hard last week, taking several major web sites with them. They were very close-lipped about what happened, and it turns out that maybe the Amazon cloud isn’t quite as cool as they’ve hyped it up to be. Then Sony’s Playstation network took a nose-dive, remaining offline for over a week while Sony engineers dug through the databases and learned that the account information for 70 million users had been stolen. Today Sony revealed that a few weeks ago their Online Entertainment network was also hacked, and the bad guys got away with 25 million more accounts. In all, nearly a hundred million people had their name, e-mail, mailing address, phone number, gender, and birthdate stolen. There’s credit card data in the mix as well– Sony’s already admitted up to ten million credit-card numbers have been stolen, and I imagine they’re going to fess up to some more pretty soon.

All in all, it’s a pretty dark day for the consumers who trusted these services. But hey, we’re all realists here: we recognize that despite a lot of hard work on the part of programmers, bad things sometimes happen. I think a lot of people learned a very hard lesson through all of this. However, I’m shocked by the basic response offered by both Amazon and Sony.

“Oops, our bad. Sorry!”

That’s pretty much it. Oh, Amazon agreed to offer a few days of free service to the customers whose sites were down for days. And Sony is giving customers a 30-day free subscription to their premium service. Wow. Really, guys? You compromise entire companies and the identities of nearly a hundred million people, and that’s the end of it?

I’m not a big fan of lawsuits or legislation, but this seems like a good time to take these guys to task. They screwed up big time here.

What does it mean for me, personally? Not a whole lot– I’m not in Sony’s database, and I didn’t really miss the web sites that crashed and burned at Amazon. But it’s made me rethink some of the security practices at Zing, and I think it’s time to make some updates. I haven’t compromised any of my clients’ data yet, but it’s never too soon to review and rethink what I do to protect it.

Kyra just got back from Walgreens, where she went with a friend to shop for… well, who knows what teenage girls shop for.

But she was thinking of me, and bought me a whole bag of one of my favorite candies:

What a great daughter.

This morning Laralee, Alex, and I ran the Longmont Mud Hen 5K. April is always sort of dicey around these parts, but I was a little surprised when I woke up at 6:30 in the morning to see snow! By the start of the race the ground was pretty well covered and it was still coming down, albeit not quite as hard as earlier.

It’s a run around McIntosh Lake in the northwest corner of town, and it’s pretty low-key. I guessed maybe five or six hundred runners participated.

I finished in 28:34 which isn’t really all that impressive a pace, but at least less than thirty minutes (which was my objective: sub-30). Considering I never train for these things and the weather wasn’t very cooperative, I can’t complain too much.

The old man still has it. Well, has something anyway.

Now that’s funny.

Yesterday I went to the dentist. It’s been two years since my last cleaning, so the guilt had built up to the point where I felt like I should go. I figured I’d have a mouthful of cavities, including several spilling out of my lips like drool or something, but as it turns out I don’t have any. Yay!

During the visit, the hygienist gave me the Standard Lecture on Flossing, which they’re required to memorize as part of Dental Hygienist School. I admitted that I only floss “occasionally”– although the fact that I floss at all is a big step up from, say, ten years ago.

After that uncomfortable conversation I couldn’t help but think of the classic Oatmeal comic called the Cycle of Flossing:

I’m writing a proposal for a new project and found this gem in the RFP:

Wow. That’s a long sentence with a lot of words that don’t really mean anything. How does one maximize something that’s optimal? How many times can “optimize” be used? Why would anyone not use “best practices” when building a web site? (“Yeah, we thought about it, but decided to use our crappy practices. The fee wasn’t large enough to justify our best ones.”)

Ahh, corporate speak. Gotta love it.

I’m building a new computer for a client, and I noticed a little black box on the motherboard.

Sweet! This computer comes equipped with a magic box!

We’re heading to southern Utah tomorrow for Laralee’s brother’s wedding. Unfortunately it looks like we’re going to have to plow through about a hundred miles of wet, slushy, snow-covered roads.

The I-70 corridor through the mountains– everything from Idaho Springs to Rifle– is marked blue on the CO-DOT maps. They just closed Vail Pass about 20 minutes ago (the red icon in the center) which is always a bad sign.

I guess we’ll see what the morning brings. Fingers crossed.

Why is Zing awesome? Because we can do the kinds of things our clients need, when they have no idea how to do it or who to even ask. Some examples from today:

One client had a list of 5,000 ZIP codes from a consumer database and needed to know which states they were in. In 10 minutes I was able to generate a list of not only states, but cities as well.

Another client needed to send an e-mail message announcing their new project to 22,000 people. As is often the case, they didn’t really get everything together until today, and they need the message sent no later than tonight. I created a nice graphic e-mail, reformatted and imported their contact list, and had everything ready to send in 40 minutes.

Someone else was having problems with Yahoo search results directing to old URL’s on his site. In 10 minutes I was able to update the configuration of his site to automatically rewrite URL’s so the search engine links were correct and people could get to his “important” pages easily.

Still another client decided to change the underlying user authentication model for their entire business, so we had a conference call to figure out an approach. I was able to come up with a solution which will give them two different “classes” of users while still preserving the overall functionality of the system.

Those are the unusual requests that came in… I also handled updates to a donation request form, launched a major new site, handled a case where a client lost all of his passwords, updated accounting calculations for million-dollar trade deals, and provided online order summary reports for someone who couldn’t figure out how to generate what she needed.

All in a day’s work, I guess. There are a lot of web design and development firms in the world– heck, there are a lot just in the Boulder area– but I feel like we’re extra awesome because we can do the things the other guys can’t.

Of course, I might be biased…

Fifteen years.

Wow, that’s a long time. But today is my fifteenth anniversary, and I must say that I still think Laralee is pretty swell. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

Photo credit: Thom, circa 2000