Categories
Uncategorized

Include your county in Monopoly

I’m not sure that everybody is playing fair with Hasbro’s Monopoly All-Ireland edition website which allows you to vote for your country to be included in the all-ireland edition.. Leitrim at #1? You gotta be kidding me.. Could be the extreme security which can only be cracked using expensive and unavailable applications like wireshark

POST /asp/submitVote.asp HTTP/1.1
Host: www.monopoly.ie
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDCCCTSTDB=CMELBCDCJFIECKHFLNNABJBI
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 124
optin=0&ageId=2&votingReason=blah&countryCode=2&cityName=Waterford&cityId=79&email=me%40mydomain%2Ecom&name=Shane%20DempseyHTTP/1.1 100 Continue
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:46:17 GMT
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:46:23 GMT
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Length: 83
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-control: private
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><response><result>success</result></response>
</body>
</html>

Yep, it’d be pretty tricky to script a HTTP post command. Even tricker to fake an email address. Not sure I’m up to it & I certainly wouldn’t advocate it. I’m not sure IIS 5.0 would handle the load anyway. Either way when you monitor the voting results it looks a tad suspicious.

Categories
philosophy

So Long Now ?

10,000 year clock

A few weeks ago I stumbled on the Long Now Foundation’s website. I find the site and projects absolutely compelling. I guess most people who got interested in technology as kids wanted to proactively shape the future, not just participate. In doing so we needed a target or goal and for many the year 2000 became that goal. It came to represent the future. People don’t talk about temporal technology goals at the moment. 2100 is too far away. It’s (possibly) outside the lifespan of today’s technologists. The Long Now foundation actively encourages people to participate in projects with implications and reach far beyond their own lifetime. One such example is Danny Hillis’s design for the 10,000 year clock. Danny is better known as the creative force behind Thinking Machines Corporation “Connection Machine” and the inventor of massively parallel computer. I love the idea of a clock that will (very) slowly beat through 10,000 years of technological, social and biological change. I’ll write more about this project over the next few days as it’s genuinely fascinating.

Categories
sport

RTE’s football pundits are muppets

Watching the build-up to the Man Utd v Milan game. I’m a keen Man Utd. supporter for many years and make no apologies for it. Having supported the team during the not so glorious days (Neil Webb anyone?) I can’t be classed a glory hunter. I also think Chelski’s millions are good for the game as it’s improved the overall standard of football in the premiership no end with Man Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelski playing some fabulous stuff over the past 2 years.
However it’s galling to watch RTE’s coverage of this game. It matters not a whit what these guys see as they always arrive at the same ludicrous conclusions. The game against Roma was a fluke. “Carrick is mediocre”. DID THEY WATCH THE SAME GAME I DID? I’ve never been a fan of Fletcher but he’s not as bad as claimed. Now Dunphy states that Ronaldo is just “hype” and “not a great player”. This opinion was so at odds with the clips we were shown that it was laughable. Equally Dunphy’s been praising Rooney even when Ronaldo’s performance’s have eclipsed his as he’s the “more honest player”. I know football punditry consists of stringing one cliche after another without dribbling on your shirt but for a supposedly intelligent journalist it’s a bit lame….
The problem is that Dunphy is wrong and deep down he knows it. However, he’s built a career on outspoken arrogance so he justifies his points my saying them louder and with greater vehemence.
Combine that with a pundit who’s actually employed by Manchester United’s opponents (Liam Brady) and it’s easy to see why no Utd supporter could reasonably watch this most partisan of football punditry. Yet, part of my TV license fee pays for this “entertainment”.
It’s a shame that a decent man like Johnny Giles has to share a bench with these muppets. He frequently looks like he’s in pain as he winces during Eamonn’s rants and Liam’s Gooner rhetoric. He deserves a break and some new co-workers. Perhaps the NOTW could spare one of the hundred or so models (“lovely girls” in Fr. Ted speak) that are so vital in explaining complex national issues like the health service or why drink driving is bad. They’d arguably be more sensible than Dunphy.
I wonder if An Taoiseach writes them another letter of complaint they’ll stop their “alarmist” and “irresponsible” punditry 🙂

Categories
technology

agility

Been reading Steve Yegge’s famous Agile rant again. I agree with pretty much everything in it as I’ve had a few painful experiences with bad agile. Many of the agile methodologies are highly loose guidelines that come with the disclaimer “use your common sense here”. Well here’s the thing, when agile pushes a manager into doing something that isn’t common sense then why try to be agile? Isn’t it just a name ?… Just an evolution of thought process which suggests that a team’s performance can be improved if they accept their development will occur in iterations rather than in one monolithic flush 😛 of the “waterfall”. The problem here is that I know (very) few engineers who ever did waterfall as badly as portrayed by the agil-evangelists. I know very few real “cowboy programmers”. They just weren’t that dumb. So from the kernel of a good idea comes dogma about how to stop evil developers doing the evil things that developers do when they’re left alone without a watchdog methodology. The following are required to control those pesky developers.

  • immature tracking tools
  • imposed rules about team and group programming.
  • odd notions about starting development without necessary background research
  • time driven iterations which don’t allow for normal human biorhythms
  • dismissive attitudes to the 80% of the time required to get the tricky 20% done
  • dismissive attitudes to detailed analysis regardless of the problem
  • religious fervour & absolute conviction

All of these things are bad agile but it’s possible to follow the books and fall into the bad agile trap. Good agile requires affinity with the problem domain and knowledge gaps are often underestimated by managers and hidden by wary engineers. Equally, many engineers cannot work in a 9-5 clock-in & clock-out way.
Now I know that Kent Beck et al. don’t intend managers to fall into these traps. It’s just that the marketing industry surrounding agile leads them to believe they’re getting something for nothing. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads to misnomers like Simple Object Access Protocol.
All I know is that in the “accurate tracking” of “agile iterations” I find myself thinking that intuitive understanding of complexity management, delegation, abstraction, team motivation & a whole bunch of things that apply across many industries are what leads a project to success. These skills generally aren’t covered in agile courses or books. Indeed it’s a wonder that nobody has really improved on Fred Brooks. These qualities exist in the manager and the team members. A truly agile process is whatever works for them & with them.
I also don’t think it’s just about “hiring smart people” either. This oft trotted-out phrase relates to the practice of hiring the apparently best and brightest grads and appears to the be the mantra of HR in many tech companies including Google & Microsoft. The problem is that it depends on the task at hand. One can have an a priori belief in the mantra and ignore empirical and anecdotal evidence to the contrary. Sustainable success is about “hiring the right people” which are not necessarily those with the highest IQ but those that can work best in a team for the realisation of a common goal.
At any given time someone has to lead, someone has to follow and both have to feel comfortable that the relationship isn’t exploitative. The guy leading has to recognise the transience of leadership and the guy following needs to at least have professional empathy for the leader and their shared goal.