How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords

Great article about password security!

By John Pozadzides
http://lifehacker.com/5505400/how-id-hack-your-weak-passwords?skyline=true&s=i

Top 500 supercomputing sites

This site tracks the top 500 supercomputing sites:

http://top500.org/

Am I the only one that hates meetings and interruptions??

I agree meetings are a good way to keep the communication flow between teams, and that the lack of communication is what kills most of the IT projects, and that meetings are an effective way to mitigate that risk.

I agree sometime you need to interrupt your colleague's work to ask something and complete your task.

BUT...........

Having several meetings every single day is also a killer! You get to do nothing in your project, generally meetings conclude with tasks assigned to people (like "review this document", "complete this form", "send this email to the team", "make sure you change this in your code", etc), and most of the time there is no good place to report that time in your timesheet (what will you say to your client, I spent 25%+ of the time in meetings, not coding? sounds unproductive and inefficient!).

That's something I like from Scrum: stand up meetings: don't put any chair in the room so everyone stands up, which forces everyone to make the meeting quick. You only talk about the important things and everyone is back at work in minutes.

I think people who hate them most are programmers. If you have a meeting in the middle of the morning you have to stop whatever you're doing and attend. By the time you come back (no matter how short the meeting was), you don't recall exactly what you were doing, you lost "your moment" and you need to put at least 5 min reviewing your design or code and focusing again.

Same happens with interruptions. I hate when people say "one quick question, won't take too much of your time". Well, your question might take me 2 minutes to answer, but your interruption will cost me additional 5-10 minutes (which of course you won't perceive because you'll be back in your desk) which I can't report in my current project (what can I put: "spent an hour this week trying to focus again after answering questions"?).

I love emails. They give you the chance to check them whenever you have time or a break. They are a permanent repository so you if someone asks you the same question again (which happens a lot), you can go back and re-send the email.

Don't get me wrong. I agree communications is critical in IT, and I love helping people solve their problems. It's just that I feel frustrated at the end of the day when I realize I did less of what I planned and that I spent a lot of time trying to re-focus.



//Update at 12:10
I'm not the only one!!!!!!

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/read-this-if-you-hate-meetings/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster104.html
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/why_i_hate_meetings/
http://www.the-arm.com/2010/03/i-hate-meetings-they-make-me-sick/
http://ezinearticles.com/?I-Hate-Meetings---10-Tips-For-Better-Meetings&id=1909313

Get the URL with Javascript

It's good to get questions from your work colleges, and specially those you can't answer right away, so you're forced to do some research.

Today one person asked me if I know a way to get the URL of a page using Javascript. I don't recall doing it before. With PHP (and its $_URL, $_POST, $_REQUEST, $_SERVER, etc variables) I never needed of JS for such task.

But it's always useful to know it and have code like the following handy:

function getHost() {
var url = window.location;
var urlparts = url.split('/');
var host = urlparts[0];
alert(host);
}

Credits go to CNET.

Decompiling Programmer-Speak

So funny and true at the same time =)

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/03/managing_progra.html

Dijkstra's Algorithm for Shortest Route Problems

http://optlab-server.sce.carleton.ca/POAnimations2007/DijkstrasAlgo.html

Programming: You're doing it wrong

If you're a programmer (as I am), please do yourself a favor and read this post by Marco Tabini in the 20th anniversary of his IT career:
http://www.phparch.com/2010/03/10/programming-youre-doing-it-wrong/

Some highlights of his post:

"Software development is the land of egos and opinions—and it seems that, no matter how bad we try, we're always doing things the wrong way."

"One of the things that I have learned in twenty years of attempting to program is that we’re all doing it wrong. You. Me. Everybody."

"If you’re agonizing over whether you’re writing good code, let me spare you the anguish: you’re doing it wrong—except if your code works, in which case you most definitely are doing it right."


Other posts by Tabini (worth to read):
- Stop Telling People to Optimize, and Start Teaching them to program
- 5 meta skills for the PHP programmer

Multiple IEs

If you are a Web developer you are likely to need a tool like this to test your site in multiple versions of Internet Explorer:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

Latex footnotes

Today I was writing a paper in Latex and tried to make a footnote referencing a URL... and the compiler threw tons of errors because it wasn't recognizing the http:// and the _ in the URL.

Here is the fix:
1. Use the package url:
\usepackage{url}

2. Inside the \footnote tag, open another tag for \url{}:
Some text here \footnote{\url{http://fix.com}} and some other text here.

Google’s PageRank algorithm traced back to the 1940s

A co-worker sent me this link today and I found it very interesting:

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/googles-pagerank-algorithm-traced-back-to-the-1940s-20100217/

The concept behind Google's search engine success is their PageRank algorithm. Well, it seems that the algorithm was first written in the 40s.

Regular Expression evaluator

If you work with Regular Expressions, you may find this tool useful:

http://rubular.com/

Page Rank checker

If you wonder what's the Page Rank of your website, you can use online tools like this one:
http://www.prchecker.info

PageRank (PR) is the "score" every page gets from every browser. Is the result of an algorithm that takes several inputs (the most important is how many links to other sites you have and the PR of those sites). If you like to learn more about PR, check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

SQL Yog

A very good tool. Works for MySQL.

Here is a list of free downloads:

http://code.google.com/p/sqlyog/downloads/list

(don't try to download it from their site since it's not free anymore, these copies are the ones they used to give as freeware).

Free HTML templates

I've been using some HTML templates I downloaded from this site:

http://www.interspire.com/

What I like the most is that they look very professional and they're simple at the same time. Re-using the design in your code is very easy and fast.

The only requisite is to keep the "Copyright" text at the bottom, which includes a link to their site.

Here are a couple of examples of the use I gave to their templates:
Education: http://www.sm-iete-bolivia.org
Automotive: http://www.servicioautomotrizmonza.com
(websites in Spanish)

Cloud Computing Expo

The 2010 Cloud Computing Expo will be held in NYC this year.

If you're in the IT business, Cloud Computing is something you should be reading about. The IT world is switching gears one more time, this time towards the "Cloud", and it promises to be a huge change in the way we provide products and services.

http://cloudcomputingexpo.com/

Some good articles have been published by ACM in their "Crossroads" magazine, Spring 2010 edition. You can read it online for free at: http://mags.acm.org/crossroads/2010spring/

Lorem Ipsum

The following page explains where the famous "Lorem Ipsum" came from (that text that you see in layouts).

http://www.lipsum.com/

It also includes a generator for your designs.

WarriorsOfThe.Net

This site has been on Internet for a while. They celebrated 10 years in 2009.

http://warriorsofthe.net/

This group of Stockholm, Sweden, designed a video to explain how Internet (and the TCP/IP protocols) works. It's a funny 12 minute explanation that helps clarify concepts.

IE6 Funeral

Everyone is invited to attend:

http://ie6funeral.com

Personally, I can't say I'll miss this browser, but for sure I'll remember it. I've spent hours trying to make my applications work with its weak architecture.